11 replies to this topic

[Zeus_XP]

Hello all,

I hope you guys will be able to help me with the following issue: I work on a multi eshop system, where the basic idea is to add new categories and products in a single admin page, and then, allow ehsop admins to use those products and categories on their pages. They shall not be able to edit in any way the product or categories.

Now, I also would like to maximize SEO ranking for these eshops. The product page will be almost the same for all eshops (the idea is to have at some point more then 20-30 such websites). What should I do? I see now only two options:

1. put my products in robots.txt deny list.
2. leave them as they are, and take a lot of google penalization.

If you have any other ideas, I thank you.

LE: I read what I wrote, and i must add an extra thing: the ideea is to push products from 2 or 3 brands to whole eshops, and allow the eshop managers to add their products too. This is the reason why I need this: to sell the app to a brand, who will be able to give eshops for free to some real shops, but force them to have some products they produce.

Edited by Zeus_XP, 06 April 2011, 18:29.

[Hotclutch]

Zeus_XP, on 06 April 2011, 18:27, said:

Hello all,

I hope you guys will be able to help me with the following issue: I work on a multi eshop system, where the basic idea is to add new categories and products in a single admin page, and then, allow ehsop admins to use those products and categories on their pages. They shall not be able to edit in any way the product or categories.

Now, I also would like to maximize SEO ranking for these eshops. The product page will be almost the same for all eshops (the idea is to have at some point more then 20-30 such websites). What should I do? I see now only two options:

1. put my products in robots.txt deny list.
2. leave them as they are, and take a lot of google penalization.

If you have any other ideas, I thank you.

LE: I read what I wrote, and i must add an extra thing: the ideea is to push products from 2 or 3 brands to whole eshops, and allow the eshop managers to add their products too. This is the reason why I need this: to sell the app to a brand, who will be able to give eshops for free to some real shops, but force them to have some products they produce.

I don't think you need to be worried about a google penalty. There are lots of shops who have the same product content (they just copy them straight from the manufacturer's price lists errors and all.), and they still rank. They won't rank as strongly as a URL with unique content, but they will still rank.

[Zeus_XP]

Thanks for your reply, Hotclutch!

Your answer is based on your experience, or is there a press release or something from Google?

[kymation]

Google has recently changed their algorithm to lower the page rank of content farms. I suspect that your pages with nearly identical content will not rank very well under this new system. However, since this is a recent change, it's still too early to be certain. I guess you could try it and find out.

Regards
Jim

[Zeus_XP]

Hello kymation,

It's not about anything like a farm: the eshops will belong to very different customers. For example: I sell a car, and I have 10 dealers with their own websites, and I want to push my car directly on their websites.

[kymation]

If the pages are identical, how is it not a farm? That's the definition of a content farm. I don't see how you are going to make the pages different for each seller.

Regards
Jim

[Hotclutch]

Zeus_XP, on 27 April 2011, 17:14, said:

Your answer is based on your experience,

Yes.

Well the URLs (domains) for each store will be different right? And presumably each store owner would make at least minor changes to their pages to personalise right? I still think the pages will rank even if the product content is exactly the same.

[cannuck1964]

Duplicate content is an issue and will effect your ratings with Google a lot. I like the canonical tag contribution and think it should be part of the overall system (with a few changes to it).

As for using the same description on several sites, you can always make up several descriptions per item, then randomly grab one of them on each page load, thus the page info is always changing.

Another technique is to have a tag line with a link at the top of the page that randomly changes (create 20 or so of them), and lastly I like to randomly display at the bottom of the page categories and sub-categoies (below the copyright etc).

All of these things will help to make the page less like each other and Google will rate this both better and come back more often as the content is seen to be consistently changing.

cheers

[Hotclutch]

The canonical tag is useful but dangerous if not implemented correctly. I don't think it should be included in the core files. The best way for a store owner to address canonical issues if he does not fully understand the canonical tag, is to submit sitemaps. That way the SE will always know what the preferred URL is.

[satish]

Force cookies to true will eliminate oscsid from url.

This will reduce the need of canonicl url.

My suggestion for a multistore shop is create an addiitonal flag stating to which store a product belongs as a product page that spider should crawl.




For the rest of site using this flag set nofollow noindex in meta tags.




Satish

[cannuck1964]

Quote

The canonical tag is useful but dangerous if not implemented correctly. I don't think it should be included in the core files. The best way for a store owner to address canonical issues if he does not fully understand the canonical tag, is to submit sitemaps. That way the SE will always know what the preferred URL is.

Anything can be dangerous if not implemented correctly, look at input fields, they too lead to holes in your script and hacking vulnerabilities.

While site maps are a good idea, they are not always followed strictly. If they were there would be no need to crawl the site at all. The Canonical tag contribution found here is a good start, with a few modifications it reduced duplicate content on a clients site from well over a 1000 to down to around 50.

This is a high ranked site and the duplicate content (from url issues) was effecting his placements a lot, once I implemented and modified the script, his placement returned.

Quote

Force cookies to true will eliminate oscsid from url.

This will reduce the need of canonicl url.

My suggestion for a multistore shop is create an addiitonal flag stating to which store a product belongs as a product page that spider should crawl.

For the rest of site using this flag set nofollow noindex in meta tags.

SIDs are not creating the duplicate URL issue (generally SIDS are turned to false in the admin or should be so SE do not even see the SID) this issue comes from a URL like this : product_info.php?product_id=100&manufacturers_id=10 and product_info.php?product_id=100 being the same product and are noted with two links thus duplicate content.

Since the products are shared among many shops (that is the nature of the multi shop contribution), the flag would really not work well in a true multi shop system. If you are just using that for management of all products for many sites, then that is not the contribution / modification to use anyway.

The idea of mixing up the descriptions and other page info is going to be more efficient and with the canonical tags in place, should over all give better page results without the sharing of page rank for duplicate urls that really do not point to different products.

cheers

Edited by cannuck1964, 08 May 2011, 11:13.

[Zeus_XP]

If the original content is modified on final websites with some personalized words (for example you sell coffee on websites John and Frank, and in the product's description you call it John's Coffee, and Frank's Coffee, and also you alter some random words on each website (putting some STRONG tags, or maybe some links), do you think this is enough for them to rank separately?

Also, second question: if, let's say, if I would have my products on an single website, and, for it, i would score 100, if i have my products on two websites, the score would be 50 on each? Or much less?