Analyzing ZAPPOS.com - how do they get away with it?

[BeytzNet]

Hi All,

The fun thing about our industry is that unlike poker - most cards are open.

While trying to learn what the big guys are doing I chose to focus on www.Zappos.com - one of the largest sports wear (especially shoes).

I looked how they categories, interlink and on their product pages.

I have a question about duplication in an age where it is SO important.
If you look in their running sneakers category you'd see that they show the same item (in different color) as two separate items - how are these pages no considered duplication?

It gets even worse - If you look inside a shoe page (a product page) in the tab "About the Brand" you'd learn that all shoes from Nike (just an example) the about the brand is exactly the same. This is about 90% of the page for hundreds of Nike shoes pages - and goes the same for all other brands.

How come they are ranked so high and not penalized in the era of Panda?
Is it as always - big brands get away with anything and everything?

Here are two example shoe pages:
Nike Dart 10 (a)
Nike Dart 10 (b)

Thanks!

[jeremycbray]

Hi, great question and find.

I recently read an article, I think that it was from distilled, on SEO Myths. One of the Myths was about duplicate content penalties.

"has the potential to dilute link equity," but apparently google weren't imposing serious penalties,

It was an interesting little piece, but i would suggest they are using a lot of no follow links.

As an e commerce developer, product variations are a hard one to index well.

I would be interested to get a few takes on how people are doing it well.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

It's because they utilize canonicals to specify the url that should get all of the authority.  Both of your examples have this:

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[/nike-dart-10~2](view-source:http://www.zappos.com/nike-dart-10%7E2)" /><script type="<a class="attribute-value">text/javascript</a>">

[Everett]

Cody that is not accurate. Only one of the pages references ...10~2 as the canonical URL. The other ones uses <link rel="canonical" href="/nike-dart-10~1" />.

[Everett]

Hello BeytzNet,

It is not uncommon at all for ecommerce sites to have product variants like this, each with their own SKU. They are, after all, two different products. If someone ordered one color and got the other they would be upset. If someone searched Google Shopping for Gray Nike Shoes and ended up on a page for Pink Nike Shoes it would not be a good experience for them.

Yes, a better way to do this would be to have unique on-page content for each variant of this shoe, or even to have one page that allows the user to choose their color from a drop-down list (oh wait, Zappos does that too...) so the page isn't optimal, but it is unlikely that Google would see this as something worth applying a penalty for. They would more likely just decide to rank only one version. Rather than being sneaky, it is probably just a scalability problem.

With that said, I know lots of lesser-known brands and websites that have been hit hard by Panda for similar "scalability problems". The fact that big, well-known brands can get away with a lot more is something that has been going on for a long time and isn't about to change any time soon. So to answer your question "how do they get away with it" - They get away with it by being a huge, well-known brand. It sucks, but that apparently provides a better user experience for Google searchers. I don't think there is any malicious purpose to that (e.g. Adsense revenue, helping Google partner sites...), rather it has to do with the way we, as searchers, react to branding by clicking on the results we are already familiar with and buying from sites we already trust.

If I were to handle the same situation I'd probably choose a canonical version and redirect the other pages to it since writing unique copy for each color shoe wouldn't be scaleable for a site that size. Of course you would lose some ability to rank for color-specific searches, but you could minimize that by listing the colors out in title or on-page content while allowing the user to select the color from a drop-down.

[BeytzNet]

Thanks for the detailed answer.

If you are putting a canonical tag then why not simply have one page with a drop down for colors?

[Everett]

As I said, that is what I would recommend doing. Zappos is not, and it could easily be due to limitations with their eCommerce or fulfillment systems since each color is probably a different sku. It could just as easily be due to the ability of these pages to rank better for each color, in which case they have an advantage over most other competitors because they can get away with it, as you have noticed.