Forum Moderators: buckworks
It got me thinking about the variety of ways we may categorize, organize, group, and otherwise create paths for visitors to our shopping carts to get to the items they want to purchase.
For example if I sell shoes. I may have a link to a predefined search for men's shoes and another that leads to a predefined search for leather shoes and yet another that leads to one for dress shoes. Now each of these 3 links appears as a static page in the URL and suppose they contain similar content. Let's say my pages average 12 products per page (give or take). Will the fact that I have repeated products create problems? Or will other on-page/off-page criteria negate this overlap? By on-page criteria I'm thinking of page titles, meta-tags, header tags. By off-page criteria I'm thinking of links to these pre-defined search pages from off-site sources like Yahoo or a shoe manufacture or what have you.
Or does it really matter at all?
That makes sense and implies that there is a certain percentage of duplication that can be allowed before the pages are considered "duplicates" by the search engines. Of course each search engine probably has it's own limit. Care to take a guess at how similar a page can be to another before it is considered a "duplicate"?
Not really. ;) I haven't studied the duplicate content issue much. Another thought I had is that you sort your results pages differently to re-arrange the order your products appear.
That would certainly help make them look different. I've gone to the point where I build key elements of the page dynamically depending upon the page requested. So if the requested page was Leather Shoes then my meta-kw, meta-desc, title, bold and italic text, as well as products listed are all predefined as well and different than another predefined search page.
>> Not really.
LOL. It's not an easy one is it. I had a conversation with Matt Cutts of Google fame once about this very issue. He didn't give me a percentage either. It definately seems to require a judgement call and even if we did have numbers - who could say if they were conservative, liberal or right on the mark?
So if the requested page was Leather Shoes then my meta-kw, meta-desc, title, bold and italic text, as well as products listed are all predefined as well and different than another predefined search page.
Sounds like a strategical approach and one that would not be seen as duplicate content. I've never given much thought to the duplicate content issues either when setting up the structure for a dynamically generated site. I know that there will be enough changes on that templated page that it could not be seen as a duplication.
Of course there are elements that remain static on the templated page. The title, description, keywords, <h> tags and other relevant information to the specific product and/or service changes based on the request.
The only time I would worry about duplication is when you are changing just a few words on the page. You know, your typical gateway page generating program that just changes the targeted keyword phrase. I'm a little leery of having pages like that sitting out there. They probably work, but I take few, if any, risks when it comes to content duplication.
