Duplicate Product BUT Unique Content -- any issues?

[SEOPA]

We have the situation where a group of products fit into 2 different categories and also serve different purposes (to the customer).

Essentially, we want to have the same product duplicated on the site, but with unique content and it would even have a slightly different product name. Some specifications would be redundant, but the core content would be different.

Any issues?

[RyanKent]

No issues as long as it is done properly.

Let's say the product is an "energy booster". You make a web page and market the product as such. Now this same product is also marketed as a "weight loss" pill. Both products have the identical ingredients, manufacturer and health warnings but they offer different labels, descriptions and listed benefits. These would be seen as two unique web pages if they contained unique supporting content.

[RDK]

Different content = smooth sailing.  Make sure that your meta content is also different and you're safe.

[SimonCullum]

Hi SEOPA

A good question. I can see two main options for you;

**1) **Have 1 physical home in a chosen category on your website for the product. List the product in the other category though point the URL of the menu item/link to the other category where it physically sits. So 2 separate listings for the product, though only 1 physical landing page for it. No duplicate content issues here, simply an extra navigation path which can benefit usability as the product fits within more than 1 category.

An example that I can relate to your question with regards to this option; on a site that I work with, we have 'buy to let insurance' under a property category and 'landlords insurance' within a business category. It's the same product, with the business category listing pointing to where the page actually sits, which is within the property category. This benefits visitors as the product applies to both property insurance and business insurance, this method aids user experience & easy navigation.

**2) **You've kind of answered this one already. The 'similar' product would have a Different Name within each category, with unique content. The product would be geared towards different audiences, so essentially, two different products both with unique content. So long as the navigation is clear and obvious for your visitors as to which one to view, I can't see any issues with this, other than page maintenance (am guessing there would be changes to make to both pages from time to time as the product changes/develops).

With this second method, you could potentially gear each product page towards different primary keywords, if indeed that's appropriate to do so.

• So either option can work well. Focus on the User Experience first and foremost, get that right, then optimize your chosen option for search.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

[EGOL]

We sell a group of products that people search for in a variety of ways.  They might use a formal term as the keyword, a slang term, an archaic term or an ignorant term.  We have separate pages optimized for each of these as the populations of people who use these various terms range from hillbillies, to average people, to geezers like me and on to industry professionals.

[SEOPA]

Great input -- and #2 is exactly what we are planning. This all came up because of User Experience and I wanted to confirm we were not missing anything from the on-site technical seo end.

Really we're talking about a different product that has the same price and possibly some of the same images and specs.

Thanks!