An ecomerce seo question

[Grumpy_Carl]

Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues.

Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily)

What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price.

Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names  (H1 will be saved for the category name).

We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page.

As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts.

Many thanks

Carl

[EGOL]

I understand why you plan to block the individual product pages from ranking.  I would probably do the same thing.

You can add multiple h2 tags to category pages but I don't think that you will get a lot of benefit from that.

Have you considered picking the best 50 products and writing unique content for the product pages and allowing those unique content pages to be indexed?  If you get a good return on them then do another 50.

That's what I would do.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Hi EGOL

Thanks for the reply, your idea about 'uniquifying' (I feel I may have made a word up there hehe) the product pages is certainly one I have been considering. It does raise a couple of issues however. Firstly, I would need to get a considerable amount of data on the products to see which ones are selling. This would need to be long enough to remove any seasonal variations in the stats.

The second issue is that the affiliate products pull from merchant data feeds so any changes I make to the content will get overwritten.

The idea of uniquifying (if I use it enough it might become a 'proper' word!!!) certain pages is one I am open to doing on my smaller sites but for the larger sites it could pose some issues. An example site can be found at www ukchic co uk  - have taken out the dots incase people thought I was posting the url for a cheeky backlink