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Jul
30

How to defeat duplicate content within SEO – Part One

craigsmith-profile This is a guest post by Craig Smith
He is the founder of Trinity Insight – an eCommerce consultancy that specializes in multivariate testing and web analytics consulting.


Search engine optimization is an evolving practice that is dependent upon understanding the dynamics of third party algorithms that makes all judgment on who is the “authority” for a user query.  Google plays this role especially well and when Google relays to users how they can help play a role in rendering more quality search results for the internet, it is in the best interests for webmasters to take notice and react accordingly.

One of Google’s interests and messages to webmasters is to eliminate the “duplicates” of the internet so their interpretation and indexing of quality websites is enhanced.  A search engine’s primary goal is to deliver both quality and useful results to web users when they search.  Because they are interested in the user coming back again and again for quality results, they know that duplicates litter the field, and ultimately make their job harder in presenting quality options.

As the owner of a web property or a manager of an internet business, you need to ensure that your website is doing everything it can to eliminate duplicate content on your domain.  Doing so can make your website rendered more often within Google search results, drive a more efficient and productive “crawl” on your domain, and make your indexed pages ultimately more effective.

Let’s examine two of the most typical instances for which a webmaster can knowingly or unknowingly have duplicate content within an eCommerce environment.

Product descriptions from the manufacturer

A typical mistake that many eCommerce businesses make is that they re-publish the exact product descriptions that are provided by product manufacturers.  By having the same product copy as other retailers at the product page level of a website, a business essentially sets their product pages up to fail for longer tail queries.

Because the business is using the same product descriptions as the competition, search algorithms have a difficult time determining which domain should be ranked highest for a query and usually devalues the group with duplicate content.

A tactic to fix this potential issue is to make slight changes to the sentence structure within all of your product descriptions as well as “beef up” the content for each product with an additional 3 sentences of copy.  Be sure to conduct proper keyword research at the time of writing to appropriately target the most prominent 3, 4, and 5 word queries for the product or category.

Attribute based filtering pages

Within progressive eCommerce platforms, users have the ability to conduct “parametric navigation” – i.e. the refinement of browsing via product variables such as price, color, material, sale or clearance, etc.  This is great for the user experience but can be a nightmare for search engines as they index a variety of pages/URL’s that are essentially the same and have really no difference in terms of content.

As a real life client example, we are engaged with a large multi-channel retailer with revenues exceeding 300mm dollars.  Because of their complex ecommerce system searching capabilities, they have a plethora of paths for one can find a product.  The problem is each path creates a distinct url for the product page.

After our analysis, we discovered that in many instances a single product page had 27 or more different variations in Google.   This not only makes Google waste time in crawling all these pages (they could be crawling other more productive areas of the site), it also dilutes the pagerank for this page which can lead to lower rankings.  This is an obvious area that can be improved as it relates to duplicate content.

In part two of this series will discuss solutions to defeat duplicate content and how you can eliminate this within your website or ecommerce store.

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Category: SEO Tips | Author: Guest Blogger
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  1. seo service bangaloreNo Gravatar

    Thanks for the information in seo and duplicate content.

    Reply

  2. Jacques Snyman | Web DevelopmentNo Gravatar

    You’ve got a good point there. All too often you see websites with 100 actual pages reflecting as having 100’s indexed. The duplication isn’t even intentional, it is the way the bblogging software works.

    Reply

  3. Search Engine Optimization Cape TownNo Gravatar

    Duplicate content is especially annoying when you are searching for specific information, and all the sites you find have very very similar information, and its either wrong or not good enough

    Reply

  4. NeeNo Gravatar

    Great post
    Thank for share

    Reply

  5. Learn GermanNo Gravatar

    I saw that your website is in Spanish and English. I guess you are using one of these WP plugins? I have a website where I want to start posting in German and English & automatically translate.

    Does that count as ‘duplicate content’? I don’t hope so… and 2nd would you mind telling which plugin you are using for the translation?

    Thanks a lot for your answers in advance!

    Reply

  6. RyanNo Gravatar

    Hi,

    This was a good post however isint this sentence quite obvious and self explanatory? ‘A tactic to fix this potential issue is to make slight changes to the sentence structure within all of your product descriptions as well as “beef up” the content for each product with an additional 3 sentences of copy’

    Working within the E commerce environment we do tend to have this problem however when your working with a transactional website with over a million product it tends to be a difficult procedure to change these descriptions. I am just of the opinion that this comes across as slightly ’stating the obvious’ in regards to preventing duplicate content.

    Reply





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Mani Karthik Hi, I'm Mani Karthik, SEO, Blogging & Social Media Enthusiast. I primarily blog about SEO and Social Media on this blog, basically How-to articles and tutorials to help the SEO learner. Feel free to have a look around and drop comments. Hope you enjoy your stay.
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