Duplicate content w/ multi eCommerce shop setup

[onlinesource]

I've posted a few times here and this is my dilemma.

So, I use a multi store setup w/ Magento and so, I manage multiple stores under one setup. The stores share a lot of things including categories, products, product reviews, product images, etc. My stores include a .com site, a .ca site, .co.uk site and .in site.

My concern how sharing effects duplicate content. It's frustrating because a lot of times other stores that I spot online will share the same stuff with other stores in their same family. For instance, Cafe Press is selling a tshirt now called "Heavy Drinker Dark" on their .com site. If you simply change the .com in the url to .ca, the exact same product reappears (same image, same description, same price) except it's in CAD vs. USD. Still, how is that NOT duplicate content?

Now, I know my site is likely small potatoes to Cafe Press and Google is probably letting them get away with stuff. I don't mean to compare myself to them, but it just got me thinking.

My current Magento eCommerce platform allows me to have custom variables and because of this, I can change the wording of html/text blocks from one store to another. For instance, when viewing my site from the .ca store, the block may say, "We offer a great selection of the items you want" and my co.uk store would say as an alternative... "Is amazing selection what you desire? Then check out our items". Again, I'm just spinning some words around to make parts of the site feel unique between store, even if it's just a block or two, but mostly what it is changing is sideboard, header and footer content.

The 500lb gorilla in the room is actual product and category descriptions! I'm talking 500+ word content about each category and/or product being sold. I say "the 500lb gorilla" because it's the only thing I'm trying hard to avoid. haha

Basically, my SEO guy is like you need fresh content per each product and category and even though let's say: test-site.co.uk/shop/item1.html is the same url as test-site.ca/shop/item1.html, the content has to be unique on each or else you risk "duplicate content" warnings. He makes it sound that I can get away with sharing the same reviews, same product images, but AT THE VERY LEAST the content or text about the item and/or category has to be unique to each shop.

My question is, how close can content be before "duplicate content" becomes an issue? In other words, just what is Google looking for? I always thought that "duplicate content" meant duplicating something like word-for-word the exact same content (verbatim) as another site, but what if the sidebars are different and the header text is slightly different but main body content is the same? Is that too similar.

I really look forwarding to getting some good feedback on this dilemma. I am in desperate need to fix my site, which lost ranking years ago after Penguin/Panda updates. I have spent so much money trying to repair the damage and although I have improved 500%, I still can't get back to page 3 or better for top keywords I desire.

My SEO guy is like, rewrite every product and category description. BUT with a lot of products, I'm looking at a thousand dollar investment or months of my site. I just want to hear from you, just how serious is this part of SEO before I sink ever last dollar into it? Can I make slight adjustments to the site or are we taking a major overhaul?

[htmlbasictutor]

There are lots of factors that come into ranking in the search results and one of them is duplicate content.

You, like many ecommerce site owners, have the problem of duplicate product descriptions (affiliate marketers have the same problem).

I would say bite the bullet and have 3 different versions of the product descriptions.

The other option would be to have one site offering 3 different currencies.

[onlinesource]

I see what you mean.

[ergophobe]

I would opt for having people select their currency and their language if you can.

Why have several pages in English (UK, US, Oz, Oh Canada) and Spanish (too numerous to mention)? One page per language, user chooses favorite currency

[onlinesource]

I talked to a Internet Marketing Ninjas today who said that if I have specifically defined sites by saying ".ca is my site for Canadian customers, .co.uk for UK customers, etc", that Google should not look at it as duplicate content because each site is geared for a specific audience.

The question is... is my site optimized for that? That, I am unsure of. :(

What I've done is of course gone into Google Webmaster Tools / "International Targeting" and made my .co.uk target for UK, .ca target Canada, etc. I've also setup hreflang tags in the site's source code:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.mysite.com/"/>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="http://www.mysite.ca/"/>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-in" href="http://www.mysite.in/"/>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://www.mysite.co.uk/"/>

When I run hreftag tests here - [flang.dejanseo.com.au...] - they seem to show they are active. And GMT now shows 4 Hreflang Tags.

[ergophobe]

Honestly, I'm looking more at from a content management standpoint.

I think the question is why you have separate sites for the US and Canada, for example. Do you have separate offices, shipping facilities, customer service numbers? In that case I would go internationalized and get the idea of separate sites for each country.

If you just are translating currencies, then I would try to go for a solution I mentioned above.

- more maintainable - I don't know how good Magento multi-language content management is, but in the couple of multi-language sites I've done, I've found it to be very difficult and to require a lot of staff, management and translator time without making it worse. If you have the resources, sure.

- in terms of dupe content, you are nevertheless splitting your internal resources and your links between multiple pages and I don't think that comes with no cost.

[onlinesource]

As far as duplicate content issues, I just realized something that really might be hurting me.

So I scanned my site in Google by doing site:mysite.tld and found that I had over 2,000 results! Ouch. My site isn't that large, maybe half that.

Basically, it's creating an inflated list by doing a few things. #1 it's creating links from searches people have done on my site. ie: [mysite.tld...] is a link but the content on the search results page is not unique at all.

It's also creating links of product categories, if there are multiple ways to display the results (ie: sort by most popular, sort price highest price to lowest price, sort price lowest to highest, etc). It regenerates the urls and adds stuff like &sort=1&recs=10 to the end. When you multiple each category by so many vacations, you get x-numbers of new links and well, 2,000 deflated results when really there is actually 800 if that.

I have gone into robots.txt and asked it to disallow things like &sort=1&recs=10. By saying.

Disallow: *&sort=1&recs=10

When I use robots.txt tester with GWT, it shows that pages like [mysite.tld...] and others are being blocked now.

Yet, site:mysite.tld still shows an inflated list. Not sure how long it will take the get this number down to a responsible level but I hope this works. I'm hoping the more Google crawls my site, the more it will level things out.

To me, it makes sense if I'm Googlebot and I see 115 versions on one page, I'm likely going to find one page that looks somewhat unique to the content, even it's the company's disclaimer.

[Mroffline]

I would say the ideal solution is to have different products text on the 3 sites.
It's a pain in the ass but in my experience dublicate content is very bad for rankings.

[onlinesource]

Spoke with IM Ninjas, who I am concerned working with, they said as long as each store has a purpose, it should be OK if they share content. Meaning that my .co.uk store is hrelang for en-gb and .ca for en-ca, so even if the content is the same overall Google should know that site A is for A, B is for B, etc and it should not be damaging. The issue now is, is my site properly formatted for Google to understand that. That is the big question.

[not2easy]

You might benefit from using Parameters in GWT to tell Google not to crawl /search results pages. If you block in robots.txt, be sure to paste some actual URLs in GWT and try it in Test robots.txt tool. I did that for my sites and it helped lower the excess URLs that aren't real pages but just results generated by search. The advice about hreflang= is correct and accepted by Google, see their answer here: [support.google.com...]

[onlinesource]

I did that earlier in GWT, eliminating potentially thousands of links. Most were junk links, but all related to parameters. Will likely take some time to update. When I search site:mysite.tld, I see the old links indexed.

I have read the article about href links. I am having somebody create a drop down store switcher with Magento and make sure these links are properly formatted as alternative and default links.

[onlinesource]

I just checked and the last time Google crawled a lot of my links with URL Parameters such as [mysite.tld...] was over a month ago! As of now, I have blocked bots from crawling pages such as these but Google has still indexed thousands of them.

Google says to wait til the next index but that would be in 8 months. :/

Should I use URL Removal Tool? I was going to submit entire urls like [mysite.tld...] and [mysite.tld...] etc.