Will duplicate content on ecommerce cause harm in search results?

[BeIntermedia]

First off, SEO learner, not a professional, therefore question is not for any client.

A new (less 1 yr) ecommerce site in a particular sector is now moving into partnership with relevant websites to be their online store. A 'store' link on the partner site will redirect to the ecommerce domain to a dedicated area (on a domain/directory path) with the partner's branding. To do this though means duplicating the entire catalogue for each partner that comes on board for this scheme.

So the original ecommercesite.com/categories also delivers

ecommercesite.com/partner1/categories (with partner's brand identity)

ecommercesite.com/partner2/categories (with partner's brand identity) and so on

Won't duplicating the product catalogue in directories cause problems in delivering effective SERPs for the original ecommerce site?

[Guest]

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[gfiorelli1]

Hi,

duplicate content per se is not cause of penalizations, but it penalizes the performance of your eCommerce in the rankings.

Infact:

1. Search Engines would rank one of the duplicate pages and not the one you would like your site would rank for (domain.com/categories)
2. People could link to a duplicate page and not the the main one, so wasting link juice
3. All the duplicated pages consume you crawl budget, therefore you could have your site indexed for duplicates but not for more important pages.

I suggest you to read this "Learn SEO" article http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content and this post by Ben Jarriola that can give you solutions to this problem: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

Hope this help you.

Ciao

[BeIntermedia]

Thank you to both for replies. Gianluca that was exactly the answer I was looking for I guess which showed that I was on the right lines with my own thinking and learning but I also think I wasn't confident enough to assert that to someone developing an ecommerce site themselves from within their own limited resources.

But my initial spot of duplicate content on their site was right, their view is to fix it with robots.txt and no index tags so your excellent second link, Gianluca, and JoelHit's response has enabled me to give them to explain their situation and confidently recommend a solution appropriate to their needs.

Many thanks