Why do branded manufacturer websites have multiple pages for their products?

[Timmmmy]

My favorite golf ball is the Srixon Tour Yellow ball. Srixon has a product detail page here  (www.srixon.com) AND there's also a product detail page here at shop.srixon.com.

Is there any sort of SEO penalty here because there's some duplication? Does the fact the store is a separate subdomain make this more allowable?

Many branded manufacturer websites work this way but it just doesn't make sense to me to have two product pages that you have to manage content when you can have just 1 with a call to action.

I also work for a branded manufacturer and am considering rebuilding our website from the ground up with the online store and the main/marketing website blended into one to eliminate this duplication. We have this same duplicated marketing/store setup as well.

any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Confused.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Tim,

If you have the MozBar loaded, you can check the Page Elements for both pages and you will find that they exist on two completely different IP addresses. So, given that there is a significant difference in the information provided by each page (one is much more user-oriented), then duplicate content is probably not something they are particularly concerned about.

Again, if you use the MozBar and look at the SEOmoz Link Analysis for each page, you will find that one is serving as a landing page for the product with a lot of internal links and a few external links evident. As a result of the content and links, it has a Page Authority of 44, while the other has a Page Authority of just 1.

My guess would be that their store setup makes it difficult for them to add content to product pages and perhaps they are concerned by the "unfriendly" nature of the 30 odd character product ID for SEO.

I have a client site where the addition of content to product pages was an issue, but in that case our Chief programmer wrote me a script so that I could edit as I wanted. If we hadn't had that ability, then I guess another option would have been to create content rich static pages as a work around.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[Timmmmy]

Thank you so much for your reply. Your info about page authority was telling. Holding technical issues as a controlled variable, If I can have an "add to cart" button on a page authority of 44 instead of page authority 1 and be able to control the content for a "best case scenario" for my users, I've got to believe that is a win-win for both the user and SEO.

To your point though, I worry we will lose our strong page authority on our product pages if we switch platforms (even if I am able to keep the URLS exactly the same).

THanks again for your help.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Tim,

My point really was that with the right expertise you should be able to improve both usability and seo usefulness of the pages you have without needing to create alternative pages. Even unfriendly URL's can be dealt with by using URL rewrites.

If you have strong page authority for your product pages now, a change of structure would generally be a last consideration for me.

The MozBar is really useful for this kind of page-level analysis. If you work through the page attributes and elements it is easy to identify both tech and optimization issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Sha

[Timmmmy]

Great feedback. thank you so much Sha.