Duplicate Content and Ecommerce Site

[duongo75]

Hi all

Hope i can get some good advise on this. I run a retail website, and it's naturally it suffers from duplicate, due to the nature of porduct listings in different categories. Can anyone advise on how to minimise this?

Many thanks in advance

[thindenim]

Hi,

One way is to block access to duplicate content through robots.txt, i.e. if your category content is the same as your sub category pages, you may want to consider blocking the subcat pages from being indexed. Also, you may want to consider adding rel="nofollow" to sub category links.

Of course, the other point of view is that the duplicate content won't have a negative effect as such, the duplicate pages will just be filtered out, or google will choose the more "relevant" page.

[kevinper]

I would like to re-ask this question in a different way. Let's say you have an internet storefront and you sell many of the same products as other websites due to the fact that you use some of the same dropshippers. You usually have permission to "copy and paste" the images and ad copy. This of course is going to be duplicate copy but you need the copy to sell the product.

So, do you need to re-write every product description so they won't be the same?

Could you have one page with a short blurb (rewritten your way) on the the product that links to a page with the original content or would you be penalized for that also?

Or should you do the above and then have "no follows" for the original content so you might not be penalized?

[cw1865]

Depends on how many skus you're facing. If you're dealing with thousands, how unique can you really be, you have no choice but to essentially publish the same product catalog as everybody else. To the extent that you can be unique it will behoove you....

[kevinper]

Well, I can change "Widget Brand 20x60 Binoculars" to "Black Binoculars with Case (20x60) " or "Favorite Outdoor Binoculars by Widget (20 x 60)" for the title and then it will be different than almost everyone else and then have that link to the full product description (that's my thought anyway).

I probably have less than a thousand but I don't want to have to pay $4.00 a click for a looky-loo to browse my site. I would rather they find it on the search engine where all I put in was a lot of time.

[Janna122003]

Originally Posted by duongo75

Hi all

Hope i can get some good advise on this. I run a retail website, and it's naturally it suffers from duplicate, due to the nature of porduct listings in different categories. Can anyone advise on how to minimise this?

Many thanks in advance

You can avoid duplicate content if you can create unique description. And as long as the site doesn't look like a mirror site and its structure is unique. It won't have any issue.

[Alan-Hart]

I try and rewrite product descriptions to contain the keyword(s) associated with that product. Not in a spammy way though. Make sure when you read it back to yourself it makes good sense.

I also agree with rewriting the product name to be more descriptive (if possible) people are more likely to search for a couple of words to start with, and will only search for 3 or more words if they didn't find what they were looking for.

e.g.
"Black Binoculars" or "Nikon Binoculars" rather than "Binoculars Nikon 20x60 Black"

Optimising your product names and descriptions may take some time (depending on how many products you have) but it is well worth it, as long as you do it correctly (not too spammy etc).

remember... it's better to write your content for the user than for the search engine. Make it easy to understand and use terms a normal person would search for not what you would search for.