Duplicate Product Pages On Niche Site

[inhouseseo]

I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site.

The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated).

I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details:

1. The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category.

2. The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda.

3. When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site.

Questions:

• Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any?

• Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source?

• Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301?

• Would you 301 if this was your site?

Thanks in advance.

[RyanPurkey]

I think a bit more would go into the consideration whether or not to 301 the site like branding, social activity, conversion rate differences, and market segments served. If everything just folds into the main site better than keeping it separate in the niche, then I'd go for it. Here's a nice case study of a company that had an issue kind of similar to yours: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing. Reading through that post will help with seeing things that they looked at in order consider merging the two domains.  Cheers!

[kwoolf]

My question to you is why shut down the niche site if it's ranking better than the main site? There is surely some risk of taking a short-term hit when merging these two sites, but I'm confident in suggesting that combining the traffic from the two sites will eventually earn similar organic ranking of your niche site pages for the same keywords.

Yes, 301 redirect your pages to the new domain if possible. If you run into technical challenges with this, use MOZ to see which pages rank the highest and prioritize those redirects to the main site domain.

You stated "The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). " I understand this to mean you found 70k products with the same/similar content on both the main site and niche site. If you simply ran a report that told you you had 70k product pages with duplicate content, I'd make sure to check your URL structure for www subdomain, trailing slashes, and the variation of both, i.e., www.domain.com/product, www.domain.com/product/, domain.com/product, domain.com/product/. These are technically all different URLs, so double check that and reply.

If you really have the same pages, obviously you'll need to fix that if combining the two sites. If you don't combine them, cross-domain canonicalization is an option (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1716747?hl=en).

[inhouseseo]

Thanks for the response.

I have used the canonical tag on both sites to deal with www/non-www issues. Both sites have a single URL for each product.

The duplicate product page issue is with the content on the body of the product page. Both the same on both sites. So I have:

www.mainsite.com/product123.html and www.nichesite.com/product123.html

I checked the page title of some products in Google with quotes, only 1 product page shows up, either from the main site or the niche site. So it seems that Google is already deciding with each product page which site to show.

[kwoolf]

Haven't read anything or experimented with using canonical link elements to indicate your preferred domain. You should have server redirects in your Apache/Nginx config file for this and also set the preferred domain in GWT to really take care of that issue.

Yes, Google will certainly decide for you if you don't have other indicators on which site you want to rank for select keywords. I suppose you'll need to decide which site to keep, but if you want both then you've got a lot of work ahead of you. Ideally, you should be ranking each product page on each site for unique keywords rather than duplicating efforts and wasting resources on trying to rank the same product page on two different sites for the same keywords. Not sure why anyone would want to do that for any other reason than testing.

Anyway, my strong advice is pick a site and then merge the other site into it. If you're using Magento or WooCommerce or some other mainstream e-com platform, this should be rather easy, if not just time consuming. If they are different platforms, then I recommend Magento or a custom solution for best technical SEO features. If you can share more details about your job, I'd be glad to help.