The Underscore Archives

Hi Dan,
Sounds like a perfectly normal shopping cart to me - with products appearing
in more than one category etc.

Does the shopping cart create duplicated main pages, or a single main page
about the product and duplicated summaries on other pages that products
available?

The worst I have seen for duplicated content on sites is that Google and
others just don't list it, or they bury it deep in supplemental results.
Others on this list might have a different experience on this though.

Depending on how you set this up, if it is just duplicated summaries of
items appearing here and there, I would not be too concerned about potential
risk. Most e-commerce sites work in exactly the same way.

If however your system is creating multiple main page results for the same
single product, it is likely that only one of them would be picked up if at
all. Maintaining such a system for updates etc with multiple main pages in
different places for a single product might also be a nightmare too.

As with most SEO, it will be how you set this up that is likely to affect
your listings more than anything else. Common sense would be to only have
one main page per product. Common sense works well for SEO too :)

If you want me to take a quick look and advise for free, send through the
URL offlist and I will get back to you.

hth

Sam

Beyond Metrix Ltd ~ evolving business online ~ www.beyondmetrix.com 

Usability, Accessibility, Validation, Best Practice, SEO and online
marketing.

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consultation. 08456 44 88 54

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-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Bramall [mailto:dan at iomi.net] 
Sent: 14 January 2008 10:51
To: underscore at under-score.org.uk
Subject: [_] Duplicate content & search engine performance

Morning [_],

We've recently rebuilt an e-commerce site which sells electronic goods, with
those goods being sorted into categories and sub-categories (put simply, the
products appear under two levels of navigation).  Currently, the products
only belong to one category and sub-category, but the client would like to
extend this so that they can place products into multiple categories and
sub-categories.

My question is, will the search engines take a dim view of this - having
multiple links and multiple file-paths pointing to essentially the same
content?  I've heard that the weighting of pages can be reduced if the
content is seen to be duplicated.  The reason we're doing this though is
totally legitimate - some of the products do span several categories - so it
would be disappointing if doing this had a negative impact on the good
search engine performance we've built up.

What are people's experiences?  Is there a 'standard' way of doing this to
make the search engines recognise that it's a legitimate requirement and not
just some content bulking exercise?

Thanks for any pointers folks...

Dan


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