Are duplicates ok? How do I get one page per product?

[petesouthwest]

After searching to find out what I should be putting in the meta tags section of each product I stumbled across posting that have made me unsure of how to proceed on two, possible related issues.

Firstly, the site I am developing/upgrading is for skin care products, (current site: www.pureskincare.co.uk) The menu system there has got rather confusing so I thought it would be better to have a menu/sections as:

Shop by
Product
..........Hair
..........Face
..........etc
..........Brand
....................List of brand names
..............................List of product types
..........Skin Type
....................Normal etc
Shop For
..........Men
..........Women
..........Children
..........Home and Pets

This is my test site so far http://www.ict-coursework.co.uk (ignore the domain name, just using that space for testing! The whole site is ‘work in progress’)

I had thought using Actinic, that the best way of setting up the products to achieve what I wanted would be to import the original data into sections that are brand based, ie shop by- brand - product type, and then copy and paste the products as duplicates in the other sections.

However, I then stumbled across this post:
http://community.actinic.com/showthr...&highlight=seo

which seems to be saying that duplicates are bad for SEO? But what is the alternative?

On searching for clarification (that I didn’t find  ) I also found many references to people saying use one product for one page….. but not how to achieve it. Is it just a matter of typing in the page name field of the layout tab on a section…… but doesn’t that mean that every product will need its own section?


Many thanks for any help given
Pete

[jont]

Remember that a section in Actinic is a page on the web - so to get 1 product per page you will need sections/sub-sections for each product.

Duplicates are great it used correctly - don't forget you can still change the description text in the duplicate to make it different from the master. Duplicates work best when you don't have 1 product per page as this is not going to be a lot of difference between the pages unless you spend time modifying the description text etc

[acompton]

I use one-page-per-product and a lot of duplicates. Google has 'correctly' indexed every unique page and ignored the duplicates. I didn't help by using:
product_name_2.html
product_name_3.html

You could try incorporating the section name and product name into the html filename, and modifying the title for each duplicate.

Alan Compton
www.greenknightgames.co.uk
Great board games and cards games you won't find in the High Street

[petesouthwest]

Duplicates are great it used correctly - don't forget you can still change the description text in the duplicate to make it different from the master. Duplicates work best when you don't have 1 product per page as this is not going to be a lot of difference between the pages unless you spend time modifying the description text etc

So if I have say 'Akamuti black soap' in 'shop by- brands- Akamuti-soap', having duplicates in 'shop by-Product Type- soaps' and 'shop for-Men- soap' and 'shop for-women-soap' is ok? Would I be using them correctly? Or do you mean to use them correctly I should modify the descriptions slightly in each duplicate?

Can you exaplin why the duplicates work best when one product to a page is not used? I guess it would be a pain to copy lots of indevidual products from their own sections, but is that the only problem?

Pete

[jont]

As pointed out by Alan above if you use duplicates of the same product but in different sections this works well with the site navigation but not so well with the search engines as the page content is by and large going to be the same.

If you use single products per page and use duplicates to populate the same items into different sections (as per your example) try and change as much as the information as possible - meta tags, keywords, page names. page titles, product descriptions etc. This does take time and the amount of text depends on your products - some product just wont lend themselves to reems of product description.

When duplicates are used amidst other products on a page this is not an issue as there is enough other content on a page to make the search engine realise it is a unique page.

[petesouthwest]

I use one-page-per-product and a lot of duplicates. Google has 'correctly' indexed every unique page and ignored the duplicates. I didn't help by using:
product_name_2.html
product_name_3.html

You could try incorporating the section name and product name into the html filename, and modifying the title for each duplicate.

Alan Compton
www.greenknightgames.co.uk
Great board games and cards games you won't find in the High Street

So its finds and lists product_name.html but not product_name_2.html? So for example you have a game called 'backpacker' are you saying that it would be for example found under Online Catalog > Card Games > Backpacker
but not under 'Online Catalog > Holiday Games > Backpacker'. Does that matter as long as someone finds the game? Or does the search engine ignore all the files as they are duplicated, rather than just the duplicates?

Pete
PS Nice to see a site that has games that involve human interaction rather than just computer games!

[jont]

it would be a pain to copy lots of indevidual products from their own section

Using duplicates is the best option in terms of maintaining them from the master - creating copies from the master will make maintenace a pig later and there is only the Product Title that can really be changed in a master over the duplicate to afford any benefit to the serach engines.... in all best to go with duplicates and change the product text (and section level info)

[jont]

Does that matter as long as someone finds the game? Or does the search engine ignore all the files as they are duplicated, rather than just the duplicates?

The trick is to get as many pages indexed by the search engines as possible as you then have more chance in someone finding your site (in theory).

Using duplicates is also useful to use slightly different keywords to that of the master - allowing you to catch a broader range of search results from what the user enters - you can alse use say Americanized spellings, typos, variations of the words etc.... it is about as been seen wide as wide an audience as possible so simply using a straight duplicate with no alterations is only of real benefit to user navigation once on your site.

HTH

[acompton]

So it was one of you looking at all the Backpackers!

I believe Google finds all the pages but does not index any that closely match an existing, indexed page.

I use duplicates to make the site easy to navigate and customers can find things of interest. Most of my competitors don't!

Alan