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Thread: Duplicate Site

  1. #21
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    With these eyes?
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    But Marty, they're so big they must be able to see better than most.
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  3. #23
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    The problem is accuracy my friend. Sort of a shotgun approach to vision...
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    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?
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  5. #25

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    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.

  6. #26

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

  7. #27
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    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.
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  8. #28

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    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.

  9. #29

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    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.

  10. #30
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    Nice idea royhunters, thanks for that.
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