Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
-
Hey all,
We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product.
In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include:
- making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs)
- adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can)
- manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue).
Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen.
Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online.
Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
-
This has images. Even bosses can understand those.
-
I would tell the boss that we have Door A... Door B... and Door C. Doors A and B are crap at low cost, Door C is yields better results but at much higher cost.
Estimate the amount of money you make per page on current site... then estimate cost of unique content writing per page and present the comparison to the boss and let him pick a door.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Content That Isn't Duplicated
In Moz, I am receiving multiple messages saying that there is duplicate page content on my website. For example, these pages are being highlighted as duplicated: https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/pop-art-graffiti/farm-with-barn-and-animals-wall-mural-3824 and https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/animals-wildlife/little-elephants-garden-seamless-pattern-wall-mural-3614. As you can see, both pages are different products, therefore I can't apply a 301 redirect or canonical tag. What do you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | e3creative0 -
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Two Domains, Same Products/Content
We're an e-commerce company with two domains. One is our original company name/domain, one is a newer top-level domain. The older domain doesn't receive as much traffic but is still searched and used by long-time customers who are loyal to that brand, who we don't want to alienate. The sites are both identical in products and content, which creates a duplicate content issue. I have come across two options so far: 1. a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one. 2. Optimize the content on the newer domain (the strongest of the two) and leave the older domain content as is. Does anyone know of a solution better than the two I listed above or have experience resolving a similar problem in the past?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ilewis0 -
Duplicate content due to parked domains
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Duplicate content based on filters
Hi Community, There have probably been a few answers to this and I have more or less made up my mind about it but would like to pose the question or as that you post a link to the correct article for this please. I have a travel site with multiple accommodations (for example), obviously there are many filter to try find exactly what you want, youcan sort by region, city, rating, price, type of accommodation (hotel, guest house, etc.). This all leads to one invevitable conclusion, many of the results would be the same. My question is how would you handle this? Via a rel canonical to the main categories (such as region or town) thus making it the successor, or no follow all the sub-category pages, thereby not allowing any search to reach deeper in. Thanks for the time and effort.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Duplicate content
I run about 10 sites and most of them seemed to fall foul of the penguin update and even though I have never sought inorganic links I have been frantically searching for a link based answer since April. However since asking a question here I have been pointed in another direction by one of your contributors. It seems At least 6 of my sites have duplicate content issues. If you search Google for "We have selected nearly 200 pictures of short haircuts and hair styles in 16 galleries" which is the first bit of text from the site short-hairstyles.com about 30000 results appear. I don't know where they're from nor why anyone would want to do this. I presume its automated since there is so much of it. I have decided to redo the content. So I guess (hope) at some point in the future the duplicate nature will be flushed from Google's index? But how do I prevent it happening again? It's impractical to redo the content every month or so. For example if you search for "This facility is written in Flash® to use it you need to have Flash® installed." from another of my sites that I coincidently uploaded a new page to a couple of days ago, only the duplicate content shows up not my original site. So whoever is doing this is finding new stuff on my site and getting it indexed on google before even google sees it on my site! Thanks, Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use. I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
Should I robots block site directories with primarily duplicate content?
Our site, CareerBliss.com, primarily offers unique content in the form of company reviews and exclusive salary information. As a means of driving revenue, we also have a lot of job listings in ouir /jobs/ directory, as well as educational resources (/career-tools/education/) in our. The bulk of this information are feeds, which exist on other websites (duplicate). Does it make sense to go ahead and robots block these portions of our site? My thinking is in doing so, it will help reallocate our site authority helping the /salary/ and /company-reviews/ pages rank higher, and this is where most of the people are finding our site via search anyways. ie. http://www.careerbliss.com/jobs/cisco-systems-jobs-812156/ http://www.careerbliss.com/jobs/jobs-near-you/?l=irvine%2c+ca&landing=true http://www.careerbliss.com/career-tools/education/education-teaching-category-5/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0