Handling duplicate content, whilst making both rank well

[relientmark]

Hey MOZperts,

I run a marketplace called Zibbet.com and we have 1000s of individual stores within our marketplace. We are about to launch a new initiative giving all sellers their own stand-alone websites.

URL structure:
Marketplace URL: http://www.zibbet.com/pillowlink
Stand-alone site URL: http://pillowlink.zibbet.com (doesn't work yet)

Essentially, their stand-alone website is a duplicate of their marketplace store. Same items (item title, description), same seller bios, same shop introduction content etc but it just has a different layout. You can scroll down and see a preview of the different pages (if that helps you visualize what we're doing), here.

My Questions: My desire is for both the sellers marketplace store and their stand-alone website to have good rankings in the SERPS.

• Is this possible?
• Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one?
• Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue?

Keen to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions for how we can handle this best.

Thanks in advance!

[eyepaq]

Hi,

First of all I would really take care of that Panda issue you have there: http://screencast.com/t/SzbL6hTFwWr

To answer your questions:

• Is this possible?

They can't rank both. You need to decide canonical version - the one to rule them all

• Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one?

There are no duplicate content issues but yes, it's best that you chose and don't let google do that for you. Add rel canonical.

• Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue?

That won't help.

Overall you got hit by Panda already - you should take care of what content you push into the index as that's not the way to recover. before pushing more content into the index you should clean the site for all issues related with Panda.

Cheers.

[Chris.Menke]

If I understand correctly, you're asking how you can create a business model that fills up the search results with a bunch of sites that all have the same content.  I think you're somewhat late to that party.  The Google of today doesn't really let you do that and it's pretty good at preventing it.   And if you were thinking of maybe linking back to your main site from all those dupes, I'd rethink that strategy, as well.

[relientmark]

Thanks so much for your input.

I must admit, I'm not too familiar with Panda, so will need to do some digging there. We literally launched the new version of Zibbet 2 months ago, with different meta data etc, so I'm not sure how that affects it.

If we don't add the rel=canonical, do you think we'll get punished by Google?

[relientmark]

No. We're actually not launching this initiative for SEO purposes. We just want to create value for our users and having their own stand-alone website is valuable to them.

I just want to make sure we're structured properly from an SEO point of view so that we don't compromise the SEO of our marketplace, or their stand-alone site.

Also, each site has unique content, but it is identical data to their marketplace store. So, every seller has a marketplace store (with items, a profile etc) AND a stand-alone website (with the same items, same profile etc, just designed differently and accessible via a sub-domain).

Hope that makes sense.