4000 new duplicate products on our ecommerce site, potential impact?

[ThomasHarvey]

Hello,

We've currently got 9500 products live on our site at the moment with ~2000 in this category that we're adding the new products in. All of these products we're adding are coming from a site that we own and we're trying to expand the range on our site (the 9500 product site has a lot more visitors than the 4000 product site).

However, all these products imported I believe are atleast duplicates from the 4000 product site, but the first ones I have seen (500) are manufacturer duplicates.

What issues are we potentially going to run in to?

Just for extra information:

We have no control over canonical/noindex/robots etc

[JordanLowry]

Sounds like a duplicate content issue. You may not get penalized but you could potentially see a drop in rankings.

[GlobeRunner]

Sounds as if you shouldn't be adding all of those--there could potentially be severe consequences if you don't deal with them properly. That severe consequence could be that you are hit by a Google Panda penalty, and lost a huge majority of your site's traffic from organic search.

You really do need to deal with this in some way--either don't add them like you're doing or use the canonical tag.

[MikeRoberts]

Is the 4000 product site still going to exist or is it being stripped and moved to the 9500 product site? If everything is getting completely moved from one site to the other then you really do need to find out who has access to canonicals or 301 redirects so you can move the sites properly. If the smaller site is staying up and selling those products still, realize you'd be canibalizing your own traffic potentially and could wind up with shoddy rankings from all the scraped/dupe content.

Since you have no access to Canonical/NoIndex/Robots/etc. the question is, what do you have access to? Do you need to move all these products over? Are they exact duplicate of things you have on your site already? If its an exact duplicate of something you offer then you probably shouldn't add a duplicate page but you should canonical or 301 if you were able to. If they're close but have slight differences then you might be better served by adding a new product option to the existing page for the similar product in order to better serve the consumer, instead of diluting rankings with something so similar. Though you till might need that canonical or redirect to ensure everything is targeted properly.

[BenjaminMorel]

You're likely to see problems resulting from a few different factors:

• Search engines go through a limited number of pages on your site, known as a crawl budget. Around a third of that budget will go cataloguing duplicate products, which is a waste since those pages will be discarded since...
• If a search engine sees two pages with the same content only one will rank. This means there is no point from an SEO perspective to having those 4,000 extra pages, since nobody will land on them
• Because you're providing content that sin't high quality the rest of the site may well get hit by Panda, bringing the rest of your rankings down
• Customers will see the two identical products, spend a bit of time trying to figure out the difference between them, get frustrated, then buy from somebody else

If you're looking at convincing your boss not to do this then here's the important bit: add those products and you risk getting fewer people to your site and fewer of those people turning into customers.