Avoiding duplicate content with national e-commerce products and localized vendors

[CatalystSEM]

Hello 'mozzers!

For our example purposes, let's say we have a national cog reseller, www.cogexample.com, focusing on B2C cog sales.  The website's SEO efforts revolve around keywords with high search volumes -- no long tail keywords here!

CogExample.com sells over 35,000 different varieties of cogs online, broken into search engine friendly categories and using both HTML and Meta pagination techniques to ensure adequate deep-linking and indexing of their individual product pages.

With their recent fiscal success, CogExample.com has signed 2,500 retailers across the United States to re-sell their cogs.

CogExample.com's primary objective is B2C online sales for their highly-sought search terms, ie "green cogs". However, CogExample.com also wants their retailers to show up for local/geo search; ie "seattle green cogs".

The geo/location-based retailer's web-content will be delivered from the same database as the primary online store, and thus is very likely to cause duplicate content issues.

Questions

1. If the canonical meta tag is used to point the geo-based product to the online primary product, the geo-based product will likely be placed in the supplementary indexed. Is this correct?

2. Given the massive product database (35,000) and retailers (2,500) it is not feasible to re-write 87,500,000 pages of content to sate unique content needs. Is there any way to prevent the duplicate content penalty?

3. Google product feeds will be used to localize content and feed Google's product search. Is this "enough" to garnish sizable amounts of traffic and/or retain SERP ranks?

[EGOL]

2. Given the massive product database (35,000) and retailers (2,500) it is not feasible to re-write 87,500,000 pages of content to sate unique content needs. Is there any way to prevent the duplicate content penalty?

Everybody everywhere is asking this question.   "I have twenty-five websites that sell the same product and I use the same product description, photos, captions, title tags, etc. on every  one of them.  Is there anyway to fool google into believing that these are unique?"

Your problem is 100 times larger.

Looking at the history.....  Google has been killing "instant storefront" websites for the past several years

If you figure out a way to do this you will be able to make a lot more money selling the solution than you are going to make from your 35,000 products.

I think that is the money making opportunity.

[donford]

I was asked the same question recently by a person selling Sunglasses, thousands of them all with straight copy + paste manufacturers descriptions.

The only solution I can come up with that is anywhere near feasible is to create unique landing pages for the main keywords. In your case a landing page for Green Cogs or his case a landing page for Prescription Sunglasses. You can hopefully develop a few pages to get ranked and hopefully turn them rankings into customers.

With that strategy I also recommended employing a Review Section which would hopefully turn those customers into reviewers, thus generating unique content on each product page.

That is my best solution to date...

[EGOL]

If this solution works you have a lot of potential customers.

Here is a thought... Since google is demoting sites that have lots of duplicate content if you use name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> on all of the duplicate pages then the pages that remain in the index will have a better chance of ranking.

There are also other ways to keep them out of the index.