Duplicate content Issues for the resellers

[subhzash]

Hi All,

My client has signed as a reseller to one of the product selling sites. He wants to build a site to resell the products in other geographical areas where main site is not selling their products.

The client wants to make an exact replica of the site in which he has signed up as reseller. Now my question is does he face duplicate content issues from the search engines? If yes, what are some ways to solve this?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

[louis2609]

I think you should re-optimize your website in content. If it is duplicate content, you should avoid it; or website will be removed from SERPs.

[subhzash]

I think you should re-optimize your website in content. If it is duplicate content, you should avoid it; or website will be removed from SERPs.

Thanks for the reply. Main problem is there is huge amount of content if we re-write it will take lot of time.

[subhzash]

I have one idea. Can we use the external website in canonical tag to avoid penalty from Search Engines?

[NickTyler81]

I don't think you can use the canonical tag for the external site as the root domain will be different. Also I'm not sure that you will get a big penalty for the duplicate content as the engine should know yours is the origional as it is alot older and will have been crawled before. The external site may have a problem with dup but that may not be so much your concern.

Maybe try to build the external site as a non-exact duplicate? There must be another way to display the same info but in different structure nav order?

There are alot of product descriptions that are used many times across the web for many places selling the same product and I would hope the engines are intelligent enough to realise that.

[innominds]

Even if it takes time, I would recommend you to get UNIQUE content for the site.
These days it is very difficult to survive in online business despite of being unique.
So, you should not take the things for granted.
Work hard even if it takes time.
I hope your efforts will be paid sooner.

[michaelhartzell]

Agreed about duplicate content and possibly rethinking the optimization vs. copy and paste.

There is no guarantee that a past description is optimized either.

[claybutler]

I think you should re-optimize your website in content. If it is duplicate content, you should avoid it; or website will be removed from SERPs.

This is not true. Here's how Google handles duplicate content. The algorithm will take all factors into consideration and then present the one it feels is most relevant followed by the others until it runs out of matches. That's it. No penalties and no purging from the SERP's. Generally with an affilate site the owner relies on social networking and PPC to drive traffic because they are offing nothing special that can't be found on a hundred other affiliate sites. So natural high SEPRs position is very difficult. You can overcome the dupe content somewhat by inbound links with great anchor text and customizing all the other elements that are in your control. But if you just want to dupe a site and thing you're going to make money you're dreaming. No going to happen. Affiliate marketing is really hard work.

[C0ldf1re]

... Affiliate marketing is really hard work.

Yes. For those who don't know, no "ready-made affiliate site" is ever going to make it in SERPS.

[DonOmite]

Start out dupe then change things. It doesn't take a lot to make it non-dupe. Do changes to alt-texts and such.