Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's

[SKP]

I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets

1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/

2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/

The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down...

.com/shop/wiget/color/shape/

The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc.

Here are my questions.

1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer?

2.  Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page?

3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page.

I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying.

As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets.

Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!

[irvingw]

The first question I would have is why?

"The issue here is when I combine my content widget with my shop widget page, no one buys anything."

You can include all of your content on the shop page and hide it in a jquery and the shop page would look almost identical to how it is now, but that page would rank because of the content and the user would be one click closer to the purchase than if they were to land on the information page first.

I would suggest doing that and only having one page per product with the information on the page in a way that does not negatively impact conversion rates. Some a/b testing may be in order, A/B testing is always in order anyway for conversion pages

[SKP]

The main reason that I have two pages about Wigets is due in part to the shopping experience.

If someone comes to my page, the last things they want to do is read a whole bunch of "googley goop" about Wigets. I know, sounds crazy, but the truth is in the putting.

I have served up filter pages with widgets on them, and I have served up pages with widgets + content about widgets on them, and i have servered up only pages about widgets with links out to widget filter pages. The best performing pages are those with only a vast amount of widgets (little pictures and micro descriptions) on them. My customers just want to browse browse browse, they dont want to read any thing. Call me crazy

That being the case, this does not make for a good landing page for Google for so many reasons be it duplicate content, lack of unique content etc. Google wants unique quality content, and my landing page about widgets (the page with just a bunch of squares each containing a widget and micro content such as name and color) just does not suffice. Keep in mind I have over 20K widgets on my site.

That is the reason why it is very necessary for me to have a page about widgets and a shopping page showing all the variety of widgets in all their shapes and colors.

The content page is all about widgets, how their are made, sizes, colors, links to articles etc. If I were to put this on the widget shopping page, I can kiss all my sales goodbye. The reason I know this is because I have done it and this was the reward I received from my customers. My customers only want to browse and shop widgets and the Google gods want content about widgets, not just a collection widgets on a page, because everyone else is doing that. I have actually created lots of content pages about my widgets with amazing content. No one else has this, that is why I need two pages.

Thus my dilema which I spoke of before in my original post.

Any suggestions are welcome Cheers!