Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As a co-founder of a startup that is weekly featured on high page rank news sites such as TechCrunch, The Next Web, TreeHugger , Yahoo News etc.

These types of write ups are "SEO Gold" as they are high page rank sites with high relevancy to our sector and with unique good quality anchor text and copy.

However... Within hours of each post going live the content and links are syndicated either via RSS or scraped and appear as duplicate content on in some cases 100's of very low quality and low relevancy content aggregation sites.

To give you an example here are just two of the sites that are now appearing as linking domains due to this syndicated content and the links included in the article.

Examples :

Eco Market, The “Etsy For Eco,” Rebrands, Revamps, Raises & Prepares A U.S. Launch

Sarah Perez | Technology | Page 4

The above are just a couple of examples amongst 100's that result from each feature.

I would like to hear you opinion on if these links would be considered natural and you feel I should not take action or if you think these need removing by contacting the webmasters or disavowing the links?

I am sure I cant be alone in having this problem and look forward to hearing you advice and tips

Anyone else have any opinions on this?

Hey oleg. Thanks for this sounds encouraging. Re unique urls, this isnt an issue as A) the category list is limited and is controlled by us not our members B) we will have validation in place to stop categories having the same name as poducts (this geta validator during the product upload process) so cats and products having the same name wont happen. 3) we wont be using id slugs all all product names (again validated on upload) will be unique. Its a slightly seperate issue really though, for the sake of this post would be good to get some more opinions on whether that more flat structure would get a more positive outcome due to the category/product heierarchy being clearer?

Hello All.

I run an online marketplace start-up that has around 10000 products listed from around 1000+ sellers. We are a similar model to etsy/ebay in the sense that we provide a platform but sellers to list products and sell them.

I have a URL structure question.

I have read http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-define-best-url-structure-for-product-pages which seems to show everyone suggests to use

Products: products/category/product-name

Categories: products/category

as the structure for product pages.

Because we are a marketplace (our category structure has multiple tiers sometimes up to 3) our sellers choose a category for products to go in.

How we have handled this before is we have used:

Products: products/last-tier-category-chosen/product-name (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks/fluffy-marshmallows)

Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks)

However we have two issues with this:

1. The categories can sometimes change, or users can change them which means the links completely change and undo any link building work built up.
2. The urls can get a bit long and am worried that the most important data (the fluffy marshmallow that reflects in the page title and content) is left till too late in the URL.

As a result we plan to change our URL structure (we are going through a rebuild anyhow so losing old links is not an issue here) so that the new structure was:

Products: products/product-name(eg: /products/fluffy-marshmallows)

Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks)

My concern about doing this however, and question here, is whether this willnegatively impact the "structure" of pages when google crawls our marketplace.Because "fluffy marshmallows" will no longer technically fit into the url structure of "sweets and snacks". I dont know if this would have a negative impact or not.

FYI etsy (one of the largest marketplace models in the world) us the latter approach and do not have categories in product urls, eg:

listing/42003836/vintage-french-industrial-inspired-side

Any ideas on this? Many thanks!