Can Sitemap Be Used to Manage Canonical URLs?

[lbohen]

We have a duplicate content challenge that likely has contributed to us loosing SERPs especially for generic keywords such as "audiobook," "audiobooks," "audio book," and "audio books."

Our duplicate content is on two levels.

1. The first level is at our web store, www.audiobooksonline.com.

Audiobooks are sometimes published in abridged, unabridged, on compact discs, on MP3 CD by the same publisher. In this case we use the publisher description of the story for each "flavor" = duplicate content.

Can we use our sitemap to identify only one "flavor" so that a spider doesn't index the others?

2. The second level is that most online merchants of the same publisher's audio book use the same description of the story = lots of duplicate content on the Web.

In that we have 11,000+ audio book titles offered at our Web store, I expect Google sees us as having lots of duplicated (on the Web) content and devalues our site.

Some of our competitors who rank very high for our generic keywords use the same publisher's description.

Any suggestions on how we could make our individual audio book title pages unique will be greatly appreciated.

[ThompsonPaul]

Your sitemap.xml can't be used to solve this issue, Larry. The sitemap is only used to tell the search engines which pages exist on the site, not what to do if many of those pages share similar content.

In your case, likely the best approach is to use the rel=canonical tag to inform the search engines that you aware that the different formats of the audiobooks share similar descriptions, and to pick one format to be the primary page. Once you've determined the primary page, the other formats' pages would use the canonical tag in their headers to point to the primary page.

This essentially tells the search engines "these other pages are useful to the user, so I don't want to hide them, but they are really variations of the primary page, so assign all their value to the primary page, please".

This process is only a suggestion to the search engines, but it is usually heeded. The only real alternative would be to combine all the different format pages into one page with a description of the book, then listing the other formats and their prices. Kinda doubt your eCommerce system would allow this "out of the box". (You would then 301-redirect all the other format pages to the new main page.)

As for the fact that the book descriptions are the same as the publisher's and all the other sites - the only way around this is to write your own custom descriptions. There are many reasons the other sites could be ranking well even with those duplicate descriptions, ranging from better overall site authority, to having been online longer, to having better, more powerful incoming links.

It's a tough spot to be in, but you could start by rewriting the descriptions for, say,  the top 25 books (according to your Analytics and your own instincts for which ones are the most valuable sales) and see if that results in an improvement to rankings and conversions.

One other way to beat the duplicate content in this case would be to get customers to leave reviews which are included on each page. These reviews would be different from other sites, making the overall content look different to the search engines. But this is also a lot of work to get to scale up as your customers must be encouraged to come back to your site at a later date to leave the review.

Hope that helps;

Paul