Duplicate Content Question (E-Commerce Site)

[JustinGeeks]

Hi All,

I have a page that ranks well for the keyword “refurbished Xbox 360”.  The ranking page is an eCommerce product details page for a particular XBOX 360 system that we do not currently have in stock (currently, we do not remove a product details page from the website, even if it sells out – as we bring similar items into inventory, e.g. more XBOX 360s, new additional pages are created for them).  Long story short, given this way of doing things, we have now accumulated 79 “refurbished XBOX 360” product details pages across the website that currently, or at some point in time, reflected some version of a refurbished XBOX 360 in our inventory.

From an SEO standpoint, it’s clear that we have a serious duplicate content problem with all of these nearly identical XBOX 360 product pages.  Management is beginning to question why our latest, in-stock, XBOX 360 product pages aren't ranking and why this stale, out-of-stock, XBOX 360 product page still is.  We are in obvious need of a better process for retiring old, irrelevant (product) content and eliminating duplicate content, but the question remains, how exactly is Google choosing to rank this one versus the others since they are primarily duplicate pages?  Has Google simply determined this one to be the original?  What would be the best practice approach to solving a problem like this from an SEO standpoint – 301 redirect all out of stock pages to in stock pages, remove the irrelevant page?

Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Justin

[eli.boda]

One of the likely reasons for the old pages outranking the new one is that they accumulated links, whereas the new one hasn't had the chance yet.

I would do 301 redirects for all these pages pointing to the new one. This will benefit you in a few different ways.

• It would pass the link authority from all these old pages to the new page, helping it's rankings
• It will solve the duplicate content problem with search engines
• Any visitor that enters the site from a link to one of these pages will automatically be sent to the new page

[Debdulal]

_Ideal solutions would be using Meta refresh tag but the problem is search engines are against this practice. So, as things stand, you have to use 301 redirect to fix this issue. I know there is a possibility that ranking may suffer a bit. So, here is the suggestion -

What about making a bit changes in the body content to use this page as a landing page for a new product. I hope you just have to make some changes in the specification or the title will have a slight modification. If you can manage to do this, you will be in a win-win situation. Let us know what you think about this. _