Duplicate Site

[billbenson]

I have my main site, marketed primarily via adwords. Sells expensive construction equipment and has fairly high margins. Several thousand products with prices from $100 to $6k. An average order is probably $800. I get a 10k credit card order here and there. It takes a lot of sales management time. Technical product.

I want to put up a duplicate discount site using SERPS for traffic, not adwords. I do loose sales to price shoppers. Particularly on the less expensive items - say 300 dollars or less. Sometimes on expensive items though. It would be pretty easy to make the look and feel of the site different, but to change the content would be very difficult. Technical descriptions are difficult to rewrite.

The new site would ideally place 10 in G for searches. I don't want my current customers to go to the new site. It would also be a no frills site. No telephone support, good prices etc. I have days where I spend 10 plus hours on the phone and writing quotes. I can't do that for the discount site.

Anybody have any thoughts on how to approach this?

[vangogh]

I think the best way to set it up is to focus one site on the person looking for quality and value and focus the other site on the person looking for the bargain. I don't think you're going to be able to control who sees which site, since you want both to be seen. Ultimately you're competing with yourself for search and other traffic and some people you prefer to go to the current site will end up on the new site and may go for the bargain price.

That's why I think the best idea would be to work the content so each site appeals to the different groups of people. Look to what motivates the bargain shopper and work the content of the new site to persuade the bargain hunter. Work the content of the existing site to persuade the value shopper.

If you focus the content well enough on each type of user, you could also link between the two sites so that the value shopper landing on the bargain site could be redirected to the value site and vice versa.

I don't think you'll be able to keep some people away from the bargain site though. If you create it and promote it people are going to find it and some of those people may have been people who would have bought at the higher margins.

[seolman]

Bill - I know this might sound a bit crazy but are you sure you couldn't do something like Lands' End | Outerwear, Swimwear, Casual Clothing and more (http://www.landsend.com) does? They have a section of the site called "On the Counter". Basically it's their super bargain basement items - out the door they go, period. I haven't seen your original site and obviously it may not fit your corporate image to have a link such as that - but it seems an awful lot of work to have 2 sites with the same content when you could be flipping a digital switch and placing an item into the discount bin and super optimizing those pages.

If you have a section of the site say

.../bargains/equipment-name1
.../bargains/equipment-name2
.../bargains/equipment-name3

etc.

I think Steve would likely agree with me you can certainly take a sub-section of a web site, give it a new skin and optimize it apart from the rest of the site. Ultimately that traffic ends up contributing to the overall traffic of the main site. You may be able to move some of the bargain hunting traffic up to the high end and VV.

Just a thought.

[billbenson]

I'll give you an example. I got an order the other day for about 7k. The reason I got the order is the price was wrong on the site. The price should have been about 10k. I ultimately broke even on the order. The customer said he did a lot of searching and we had the best price.

I also get a lot of orders where people just call up and ask for a quote. I send them a quote, they give me a credit card and its a done deal. No price shopping at all.

I was thinking along the lines of putting a no follow on the catalog section (it would probably be zen cart) installed as a subdirectory and build up optimized informational pages at the root level. Several thousand product pages in a cart that has a short and a long description is a lot of rewriting.

[Spider]

I have two thoughts, going on nothing more than the descriptions in your post.

1. You said the price cutters are mostly after the lower priced goods and not so much in the higher priced goods. - ...I do lose sales to price shoppers. Particularly on the less expensive items - say 300 dollars or less. Sometimes on expensive items though....

Then, you might consider making all your smaller items cut-price, no service, cash only. And make your more expensive items full-price, full service, quotes and invoices. That way, you don't have to try and hide part of your business from the other part's customers.

2. What if you invite someone to set up another business entirely, with Bill's HighPrice Inc, selling at a heavy discount to Bobby's Bargain Basement Inc. who sell to the public at a lower price. You could be a shareholder in Bobby's Bargain Basement Inc. or even a 100% owner, as long as someone else answers the phone.


It seems to me you are not going to keep all your big spenders off the low priced site and they will be upset when they find you are charging them more than some other customers for the same goods. That's a sure way to lose them all!

[billbenson]

I hear what you are saying, Fredrick. Private domain registration and set up another dba for credit card processing under a different company name and there is no real reason someone would figure out it's the same company. I had also thought of the limited number of products on the discount site. But people price shop for expensive items as well. Also, I may get an order for 40 of the cheap items from the Navy. The cheap items may be included with expensive items in a consultative sell.

The answer the phone thing is what I do not want to do on the cheap site. I wouldn't publish my phone on the cheap site - or use a second line. I don't have the time to field the calls from the cheap site.

One other thing is I have no real data as to how much money I loose to the price shoppers. Remember, this is a b2b product line, not a consumer product. Beyond that, clients are frequently in the oil industry, government, military, or very large corporations. If they are price shopping, they send out a bid. They ask the world what they will do on price.

It's a technically complicated product line. To bring someone else up to speed would take 2 years. Partnering for the cheap site and I would be on the phone training the partner all the time. Doesn't solve the time management issue.

Writing this though makes me think that your one idea of segmenting it to just sell the less expensive products - I can think of one particular group, might be the best thing to do. Could make an extra 500 per week with no phone consultation requirements in that particular product line. Still it would be 500 dup content items I'd have to rewrite.

Site stats are only somewhat useful in this because I think engineers go on the site, write down the part number and phone, give it to a secretary and say buy this, and close out of the site. Because they get there by adwords, they land on the page they were looking for and leave. Doesn't mean I didn't get the order. Time on the site, pages viewed etc are pretty worthless. Search terms have a lot of value though.

[orion_joel]

I think that maybe a possible option could be to make the second site, a cut down version on main site. By this i mean that your main site is full service, has all the product information and you have a phone number and quote from it.

On the cut down site you have more or less product code, manufacture, and a price. Don't do the full description. I would guess that often price shoppers, know the product code and the manufacture, they are looking for. So in theory, this information shouldn't be to difficult to pull from your existing site, and for the most part shouldn't really show any interlink between the sites.

If you find that this is really not generating any traffic or sales, then worry about adding additional information and what you may or may not need to rewrite. Or include just keywords, in the meta tags of the site that may draw the potential customers in.

[billbenson]

Ya, I think I'm going to scrap the idea for now Joel. I've done a bunch of searches this weekend and there are a lot of people selling the cheaper products. Found one scraped site that was number 1 for a good keyword as well. I do well, because I have a good adwords campaign. Probably better to build up support materials on the existing site for natural SERPS.

[vangogh]

Yeah maybe the answer is to keep focusing on the high end and just let the bargain hunters go elsewhere. You don't need to be both.

With the calls would you rather not have to deal with them on the current site? Is there a way you could build into the site more FAQs and tutorials to answer at least some of the basic questions? It won't stop all the calls, but it should help cut down some.

[billbenson]

See if you have an opinion on this remembering that the main site is promoted primarily through adwords. A lot of the product descriptions are dup content other than tag usage (heading, title strong, etc). I usually place in the top 1 or 2 for keywords because of a good adwords campaign. Usually in the left column.

I've been working on a CMS that I think works. I need to do some more testing and finish a few things. It automatically adds navigation. Fill in a form that has entries for the important tags and a body sections and it writes a static php page. The reason I wrote my own is I wanted to add the on page SEO that I want which the public cms's only kind of do. I might add some things like update htaccess from an admin section etc.

So, back to the site. Its structured with an oscommerce catalog as a subdirectory. I have access to hundreds of product pdf's. Product manuals etc. Most competition just sticks a pdf link on their site and sticks the pdf on their site. Lazy.

I have been thinking of using my cms in conjunction with a pdf to word converter to quickly put up html pages of the manuals. A manual on a product could be a 50 page pdf or more.

I think I could take a pdf and make a set of optimized pages in html over a weekend. 50 new pages in a weekend ain't all that bad. Yes it's more dup content; but it is content telling the search engines what the page is about by using the proper tags. I would think that G only guesses as to what a pdf is about because there are no tags to say "this is what this section is about". Manufacturer doesn't care, just like hp doesn't care if you copy their product description for a printer on their site.

So, how would this affect the site? The site would have more support information for the visitors. I personally hate having to page through an online pdf for info. I assume site visitors do as well.

The question then is, how would G view this. It's more dup content, but its proper html. They still are making their adwords money. Would it also start placing better in the natural SERPS?

[seolman]

Google doesn't really care about duplicate content. If 1,000 web sites all have a page with the same content it simply takes the best optimized page and pushes it to the top. So if your pages are better optimized and have a few more links coming to them you stand a better chance of being more highly ranked than the next guy.

Look at Wikipedia and the GNU license. So many sites allow people to copy their content for redistribution it's impossible to track it all so best SEO wins.

[billbenson]

I don't completely agree. I think site age and content age, site credibility, etc play a factor as well. I also suspect google is slower to rank you in the natural SERPS if you use adwords. I've found that to be the case and I know other webmasters who have as well. You can also find plenty of examples of sites that use adwords that also rank well naturally.

As a side note, I'm wondering if ad campaign age or site age play a factor in cpc in AdWords. It would make some sense as if a particular ad gets a lot of clicks, G can make the assumption that people like that site or ad. They are in the business of providing the best content to their visitors (among other things). My monthly adwords bill has dropped from about $600 to $500 over the last year without any real reason. I spend more time writing new ads than tweaking old ads and keywords. I don't really track it very closely, I just glance at ads and clicks here and there and look at my Adwords cost / income ratio.

[seolman]

I guess I should have couched my statement with: "all things being equal" best SEO wins. There are certainly a lot of variables that contribute to SEO apart from the pure duplicate content. Domain age, code quality blah blah etc. But if we were to get into the full gambit we'd write a new SEO Book and make millions... hey, we may have stumbled on to something here! ;)

[billbenson]

all things being equal" best SEO wins

No problem and I agree with the above statement. Just write your book and give me half the profits :)

[orion_joel]

The stuff that i have read and seen about google, in regards to duplicate content, from google themselves. Seem to push the point that they have no problem with duplicate content, as long as the site is adding value to that content. So you could have 10 pages, on 10 different domains, 9 have really only added the content to a page, while yours, adds the content, links some of the keywords in it like products to the relevant product page, and and generally adds the extra value the other sites have not. While google may just read text, it also can read a link and match the keywords between the pages. I mean this is what it does to see how relavant the landing page is for an adwords ad.

[vangogh]

I think with duplicate content Google tries to determine the original source of that content. From what I've seen they do a pretty good job when the duplicate content appears on different sites. But if you're not the original source then having the duplicate content isn't going to help that page rank at all. Search engines have no interest in displaying the same content over and over in search results.

However taking it a little further I think there's a way having a lot of duplicate content on your site can hurt you. Since Google isn't wanting to display results to dup content the duplicate pages aren't going to be indexed quite the same way the original is indexed. I still think the duplicate content goes into a supplemental index regardless of G's public stance on no longer having a supplemental index.

So imagine a certain % of your pages are seen as duplicate or supplemental. That's fine if the % is low, but if you were Google how would you look at a site where 80% of the content originated on another site? Would you think that site useful? Would you want to display it in search results? I wouldn't.

Bill if I'm understanding right about the PDFs the content only exists in PDF form at the moment. That might make things a little different in that the content might be so quickly called duplicate. In a sense it is, but in another sense it isn't.

[billbenson]

Bill if I'm understanding right about the PDFs the content only exists in PDF form at the moment. That might make things a little different in that the content might be so quickly called duplicate. In a sense it is, but in another sense it isn't.

Exactly VG. The material exists only in pdf form other than a paragraph or description here and there that someone has copied. The manufacturer is always going to have the original material and almost certainly is indexed first.

I did a site a number of years ago where the manufacturer only put their pdf catalog on their website. 100 pages or so. I spent two weeks copying it to an excel sheet and then to a oscommerce site. The pages ranked well. I lost access to the product line and so I dumped the site. But that was before G was really indexing pdf's.

So today, by converting a pdf manual or whatever that only exists in pdf for to a optimized html page, will it rank? I think I'll at least try a few pdf's and see.

The other thing to consider about dup content for product sites is most manufacturers rely on distributors to sell their products. Take HP for example. I believe you can buy directly from them, but they want distributors putting their product information on their site. Encouraging dup content if you will. It wouldn't be G's intent to penalize a good catalog site of HP products.

Now an adsense type of site that just uses scraped or dup content, G doesn't want. How does G differentiate between the two or can they?

[vangogh]

I think where people go askew with duplicate content is in the idea of it causing a penalty. I don't think that's what happens except in extreme cases like scraped MFA (made for AdSense) sites. But I do think too much duplicate content hurts your site or rather keeps your pages from ranking.

Search engines don't want to see all 10 results on page one leading to the same content. Real people wouldn't find that useful. So what's a search engine to do? They pick the page they think best and don't show the others. How they decide which page is the one to display in results is up to them, but it's usually going to be based on which page they think is the original and which page they think is the most important.

Most online stores just copy and paste manufacturer content creating hundreds or even thousands of pages that look exactly the same. Most go on not to rank well for much of anything. The manufacturer and maybe a few well marketed affiliates will rank, but that's it. The best thing an online store can do to pull search traffic is to rewrite the manufacturer product descriptions so they're unique.

[seolman]

I think where people go askew with duplicate content is in the idea of it causing a penalty. I don't think that's what happens except in extreme cases like scraped MFA (made for AdSense) sites. But I do think too much duplicate content hurts your site or rather keeps your pages from ranking.

Search engines don't want to see all 10 results on page one leading to the same content. Real people wouldn't find that useful. So what's a search engine to do? They pick the page they think best and don't show the others. How they decide which page is the one to display in results is up to them, but it's usually going to be based on which page they think is the original and which page they think is the most important.

Most online stores just copy and paste manufacturer content creating hundreds or even thousands of pages that look exactly the same. Most go on not to rank well for much of anything. The manufacturer and maybe a few well marketed affiliates will rank, but that's it. The best thing an online store can do to pull search traffic is to rewrite the manufacturer product descriptions so they're unique.

I think you are exactly right my one-eared dirty footed friend. And as proof I offer up Wikipedia. Under the GNU license everybody and their dog scrapes Wikipedia pages all day long but almost nobody outranks them for any real serious terms. All are relegated to 20,000 Leagues under the Google sea. Well stated Steve. I guess in between all that painting you must be taking writing lessons?

[vangogh]

Wikipedia is a good example. I almost pointed the site out in my post above.

Yes I have written between the drawing and painting. Perhaps you've seen my letters to my brother Theo.

[seolman]

With these eyes?

[vangogh]

But Marty, they're so big they must be able to see better than most.

[seolman]

The problem is accuracy my friend. Sort of a shotgun approach to vision...

[vangogh]

Ahh. I had not considered the accuracy. I suppose those eyes of yours take in so much information it's hard to see clearly. Does that mean you can see the forest, but can't make out the trees?

[royhunters]

Hello Bill,

I really dont see any need for you to convert any PDF files to HTML, Google has no problem indexing PDF files and there is a real benefit to having them on your server.

I had set up something similar for a client who sold a lot of plumbing products, the great thing about having all the product pages in PDF and stored on his server was the amount of traffic it generated for his website which resulted in a lot of links, a lot of page views, which really was a driving factor in the sites overall ranking. If you have external links to the information that someone can bookmark, you do not get the traffic benefit that is really essential to placing high in the search results. Google does not look at duplicate content in PDF the same way it looks at HTML. Google understands that product data sheets are almost always in PDF so if it sees a duplicate PDF, you are not going to get penalized because you have a copy of that PDF on your site. For them to penalize you for doing this defies logic because this is a pretty defacto way of building a product website like yours.

As far as price is concerned, rather than having two sites, take the product line that has the most competition and reduce those prices, still keep the same service, dont try to beat the lowest sellers price, perhaps be 20% higher. If it is a $100 item on one site, and $120 on yours but you offer much better service, a more overall enhanced product line, you will get the sale. Some of the marketing research I have done in the past shows that as long as the prices are reasonably competitive, the shopper will buy from a more trusted source even if it costs him extra to do it. If the customer knows they are going to have the service you say you provide, then it is worth it to pay the extra money.

Bids are bids and that is off site anyway. Everyone knows there are some pretty good margins in products and if I am going to spend 20K with you, I dont care what your prices are, I will ask you for a bid.

And buy the sounds of it, the margin is there to discount the less expensive product line anyway. If you can keep the PDF files on your server to generate a lot of traffic and links to your site, you could end up on page 1 eventually and reduce your overall spend with Adwords, I would not ever stop the Adwords account even if you were on page 1 because what happens is a viewer will see two ads for your company, 1 in Adwords, 1 in organic, they opt to click the organic add more often because there is a higher perceived value to clicking that link rather than a small Adwords ad. By having the adwords ad and your organic add on the same page, you are giving the perception of authority and in real world marketing that is powerful because of the brand image you are creating. There is more going on in a viewers mind than point and click.

It really is a subconscious behavior to always opt for the link of higher perceived value. It is the longer description in the organic result that creates this higher perception of value, it is human behavior to follow the value.

Every client I have had whose page ended up on page 1 of the serps has seen their overall cost of adwords campaigns reduced as well as the CTR of those ads and the CTR of the organic ad has shown an increase that surpasses the decline in the ad CTR...

So in summary, lower the price of the competitive items to 20% higher than your competitors, store the product data sheets on your server in PDF to help with traffic and links, give it 6 months and see how you go.

[royhunters]

I didnt stop to look how old this thread was... Bill are you out there? Sorry guys for resurrecting the dead.

[vangogh]

Do you know if search engines can read the content inside of PDFs or rather how well they can?

I think PDFs are a great value. I'd still want an html version of the content since I question how well the search engines can read the PDF content, but as an end user I like when sites make PDFs available, especially on longer articles or series of articles. They add great value and can generate a lot of links.

In Bill's case I believe the PDFs are short descriptions of products and perhaps even have many products listed in one PDF. It might be useful to offer the full PDF somewhere, but I think it's still good for him to extract the content and put it in html on his site.

[billbenson]

My PDF's are mostly 25 to 50 page product instructions. By converting to HTML, I can optimize the page which you can't do with a pdf. You can also break the HTML into multiple pages, a pdf file is really just a linear file that is hard to use. The PDF is good for printability, so I would keep it on the site. Also, customers like to download them, another reason to keep them there.

That doesn't contradict what you said about bookmarking. I think some would bookmark a page with the pdf links and others would bookmark the html pages.

I don't think I'm going to do the discounted site. I may if I can do it fully automated ie only online orders which I don't have to spend any time processing. I tend to doubt that is where I want to devote that much time though. I'm looking at affiliate sites for growth at this point.

[royhunters]

In my clients case the PDF information was usually viewed after the product was found to see if it met spec or was suitable for the application, the bookmarks were primarily from customers that purchased the products (Delicious is great for showng you who bookmarked the page.)

That is where the traffic came from post sale. This also saved him a ton of phone calls BTW

The link to the pdf on the product page was a link to an html page with the actual pdf link on it, the html page is what was optimised, not the pdf.

The html page gave an overview of the PDF document and was optimised like a stand alone website so it would rank well in search results. This was done to hopefully intercept a buyer looking for that item and this also worked.

Sometimes being found by your back door can pay off.

[seolman]

Nice idea royhunters, thanks for that.