Duplicate content with wholesale & Retail Sites

[Ariana]

Hello SEO friends,
I have searched these forums and read alot about "duplicate content" and am trying to decide how to handle the following so as to avoid the duplicate content filter..

My client has a retail company Hookmarks (www.hookmarks.com) that sells metal bookmarks. I have designed them a retail website that has a lot of products with their 'consumer' descriptions and retail prices.

They also need a "wholesale" site for the work that they do for the promotional products industry making custom & logo bookmarks. That site would include a subset of the bookmarks on the retail site, but with no prices (it would use the same shopping cart software but would add the products to a "quote" rather than a "cart".) The similarities would be the same image, perhaps the same product title, but a different short and long description. I can also alter the formula that displays the page title to be different (and include the words "custom" and "logo" bookmarks.)

That would be the only part of the site that could possibly be considered "duplicate". The rest would be very different, the entire structure and navigation would be different.

Would those pages set off the duplicate content filter? Even if in the html of the page there would be different title tags and nav links?

Ideally, I would want to cross link them incase someone who came to the retail site was actually interested in custom work or vice versa but I know there could be penatlies for such cross linking, especially since they are hosted on the same server. Also www.hookmarks.com has been around for years (PR 5) and the new site will be sandboxed..

The sad part is I think that keeping them as separate sites with cross links is actually serving the USER in the best possible way.

I know people will say that i should make the custom & logo site a subfolder in the retail site, but I really believe that as two separate sites we will be able to focus on that customer's particular need better. The other reason (perhaps less altruistic) is that the site owner wants to submit its products to froogle both for retail and wholesale.

Also the shopping cart software I used doesn't handle putting pages in a subfolder very well at all, making it nearly impossible to have a subfolder of say "custom bookmarks" with different main pages that would include products.. also any products listed as wholesale would also show up in the retail section without some coding. Plus, I'm not sure that from a duplicate content perspective it would make much of a difference.

Are there any suggestions on how best to handle this situation?

Thanks in advance for your expert opinions and for reading this ridiculously long post!
:)

[flood6]

Well, no one really knows just how similar pages have to be to trip G's duplicate content filter. I don't think using the same images will be an issue either way, but using different alt tags might help in distinguishing the pages from each other in Google's eyes.

You mentioned keeping the titles, the same. You might want to see if you can change them a little. I'm talking "<title>" here: Maybe try using "Nifty Metal Bookmarks" on the retail site and "Wholesale Metal Bookmarks By YourClient" on the wholesale site. Then in <hx> tags change it up a little with "Blue Nifty Bookmarks" on the retail site and "Customizable Blue Metal Bookmarks" on the wholesale.

Then modify the descriptions to match the audience for each item like you said you would. I think these changes combined with the different navigation and layout of the sites will be enough to avoid the filter.

As far as cross linking goes, I think you're right; retail customers wanting 1 metal bookmark but landing on the wholesale page would appreciate a link to the retail page, so you should do it. As you suggested, heavy cross linking between sites on the same server could land you in trouble; maybe this would be a good time to try out the new "nofollow" attribute. You'll be negating any link popularity benefit, but it should also help you avoid getting penalized.

Added: Though it is unclear if Google will totally disregard the link with nofollow, or if it will only not use it for passing PR. The difference being that it could still be used to identify cross linking or reciprocal links.

[bhartzer]

It's true that no one really knows what will set off the duplicate content filter. However, from what you're describing there's a pretty good chance that you can easily get past it.

The title tags and the meta tags definitely need to be different, and because the content on those pages is essentially going after two different markets and the content is different, you shouldn't have a problem. Each title tag and meta tag should accurately describe the content of the page.

[Ariana]

Thanks guys,
You really put my mind at ease!

I think maybe I will use the new google no follow tag to avoid the cross linking penalty, I've been considering that since I first heard about it..it might be the only way to go here.

Also I will definitely alter the metatags, fortunately for me, the software I used for the site allows titles to be generated partially dynamically (from the product name and category) in combination with whatever static words you want to add, so I can easily add Custom bookmarks or whatever in front of the product name for the title tags.

I'll see what I can do about the alt image tags too, though those might be a bit more complicated using my software.

Thanks again for your helfpul suggestions!

[cdosoftei]

I would even go further. From my experience, G is doing somthing similar as the Unix diff command, but of course I agree with other users that stated the G point of view and treatment for suplicated content that nothing is clear.

[cdosoftei]

I would even go further. From my experience, G is doing somthing similar as the Unix diff command, but of course I agree with other users that stated the G point of view and treatment for suplicated content that nothing is clear.

[corporateface]

Use different page names and rename your images.

Keith

[TechEvangelist]

These are all good recommnedations. It looks like you are using PHP. You might want to consider rearranging the content and structure of the pages on the second site. Syndicated articles appear to be escaping the duplicate content filter. That's probably because the code structure surrounding the content is different on each site.

[Ariana]

These are all good recommnedations. It looks like you are using PHP. You might want to consider rearranging the content and structure of the pages on the second site. Syndicated articles appear to be escaping the duplicate content filter. That's probably because the code structure surrounding the content is different on each site.

Good point there about the syndicated articles..

I had wanted to use the same template for the other site (I used an ecommercetemplate.com template that I customized for the shopping cart) but with differences such as that all the left nav would be different, the right column content will be different, but maybe the table structure will be pretty similar, is that ok even if the links in the left and horizontal nav are to different pages?

The shopping cart software names the alt image tags the same as the product names, so I should be ok with the images as long as I change the product names to something different.

Thanks again for your responses..

[Affiliate Boss]

Cool bookmarks.. I would like to get into a retail business...

[Affiliate Boss]

Cool bookmarks.. I would like to get into a retail business...