Website and eshop with the same product descrition is duplicate content

[svitol]

Hi there!

I'm building a website that is divided in a "marketing" and "shop" sections. The 2 sites are being authored by two companies (my company is doing the marketing one). The marketing site has all the company products while the shop will sell just some of those. I'm facing the problem of duplicated content and want to ask you guys if it will be a problem/mistake to use the same product description (and similar url) for the same product in both sites, and the right way to do it (without rewriting product descriptions).

the main site will be : www.companyname.com
the shop will be: shop.companyname.com

thanks
Francesco

[Andy.Drinkwater]

This is a resounding yes. It will cause you untold headaches with the same content on both sites.

Presumably you are wanting both sites to rank for various phrases? If not, and you only wanted the marketing site to rank, you could completely close out the sales site from Google, but then it would only ever be a shop. You wouldn't be able to link to it or do any SEO work.

The only safe way to do this is to have separate content written for each site. You are sure not to annoy Google at any point then.

I forgot to mention, that this is one of the reasons that ecommerce / affiliate sites have had such a hard time recently.

Spend a bit of time and money and have someone re-write this for you. Depending on how much there is, it shouldn't have to cost the earth.

-Andy

[svitol]

I Andy, Thanks for your response,

So do you think there's no way to mantain the same product description even using canonical link or other tricks?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I wouldn't advise using canonicalization from one site to another for this purpose. That is going to look odd to Google. In their eyes, why have you got two sites with the same content?

In fact, here is what Google say about doing this:

"Can rel="canonical" be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

• Andy

[svitol]

Andy,

Sorry for this but as I metioned earlier the two sites will be on the same domain:

www.companyname.com and
shop.companyname.com

so the canonical link will be on the same domain isn't it  right?

Thanks for your time!
Francesco

[Andy.Drinkwater]

On the same domain, yes, but what you are wanting to do may as well be a new domain as that is how Google treats subdomains.

What you need to remember is that canonicalization is used when run the risk of duplication on a site, or want to suggest to Google which page should be delivered to people searching - but it is just a suggestion.

Why would you not want to just SEO the shop site and keep it all on there? There is no reason not to have a site that has the product information and the shop in the same place. You can SEO that site and not have to worry about penalties and problems.

-Andy

[svitol]

Andy,

the customer choosed another company to run the shop but we're responsable for the marketing website. Also not all products are for sell in the eshop say 300 off 1000 (in the mktg site).

So it seems that it is necessary to rewrite descriptions for the shop, any suggestion about how to differentiate the same product description for the shop?

bye

Francesco

[Andy.Drinkwater]

You may find someone else who is happy to provide additional advice on how else this can be handled Francesco, but it is a little outside my comfort zone as it borders on grey-hat and I would hate to be responsible to causing you problems.

I'll drop you a quick PM over with something that may help with the re-writing though.

-Andy