Ecommerce SEO Series #1- Avoiding Duplicate Content

Spending the time, effort and resources into creating your online sales presence requires an additional SEO effort to ensure the livelihood of your endeavors. Complimented by better branding and sales conversions, eCommerce optimization is a must for Internet based sales websites.

One of the biggest problems with ecommerce optimization is that every site within an industry sells the same products. Many times, they’re using the same text to describe this product. Copy and paste from the manufacturer’s site is a quick way to get products added, but also a quick way to be spotted by a duplicate content filter. As those of us in the SEO industry know, duplicate content and high rankings don’t really go together. So how do you combat this problem?

One sure way to avoid duplicate content is to write your own benefits based upon the features. Instead of simply saying “12V motor”, we would say “12V for light weight with plenty of power for most household uses.” Instead of “Brushless motor”, we’d expand that to say “Innovative brushless motor which creates more power with less heat and provides a longer battery life.” Bryan Eisenberg, author of many good books about persuasive writing and customer behavior, calls this philosophy “WIIFM”, which means “What’s In It For Me?” Customers don’t want to buy a drill, they want to create a hole. Likewise, we need to relate features to them in a way that will address how it benefits them, and done properly, it’ll be unique content.

Many of our manufacturers also call their products funny names, such as “Fish Stix”, but is that what a customer searches for? Sure, some people will, and they’re the ones that already know that they want them and are very likely to buy. But only calling them Fish Stix doesn’t address those customers looking for the product by describing it. We try to make our entire line of product names not only use their marketing names, but also use a more descriptive name. In the Fish Stix example, we’d call them “Fish Stix Wire Pulling Sticks” to allow people looking to pull wire to find them as well. Naming a product by the need it fills not only helps the customer find it, but also reassures them that they’re selecting the correct product. This is not only good for SEO reasons and for making your content more unique, but will help more of the people that have found your product purchase because of the reassurance.

Once you’ve got your great content and you’re ranking well for it, it becomes very likely that someone will want to mimic your work. Unlike the offline world, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. Sure, it’s nice that they find your content good enough to use for their own site, but we’re addressing duplicate content here. We don’t want all that hard work of creating unique content to be duplicated across hundreds or thousands of other sites now, so here’s where you need to put your geek hat on. If this is beyond your level of expertise, ask around for someone that can do it for you. Being a Linux developer myself, I’ll be using .htaccess as my tool of choice.

What we’ve been very successful with on ToolBarn is making our product content drive traffic. This also brings in leeches, such as scraper sites and e-Bay sellers as well as online competitors. But we have a sneaky copy prevention system in place. Simply put, we’ve embedded 1x1 images through the main content sections of our product pages. They’re invisible on our own site, but when someone uses them on another site they show up quite differently. By creating an absolute URL link to the same page around each of those images, we’ve also created a marketing tool. In the “Apache Cookbook”, there is a section on restricting images from being used off-site. I’ll show the example, then explain how to take it a step further.

What we’re doing here is looking for a referrer of myserver.com (any or no sub domain). If it doesn’t match that, we’re showing them a different image. We can make an image easy enough saying “Image taken from ToolBarn.com” or “Quit this, you image thief”, but what works better in this situation is to create something that invites the user to click, saying “Content taken from ToolBarn.com. Click to view this product there now.” Since these images were already linked to the page on our site, the link works. But let’s take this one step further.

Since the person who views that page first is typically the seller on eBay or the person who is creating the page on another site, we can log their IP, set a cookie, and show them the original image. Now when they view their page, they don’t see the replacement image. But we’ve still got our invitation to click showing when someone else views the page. We’ve built a fairly complex script in Perl to do this using the Image::Magick module, but you don’t have to get quite that fancy. We are able to inject current pricing, custom messages, or leave the image alone. It’s all done on a referrer and image level, so we have a ton of flexibility. It’s also possible to use php or any other scripting language to do this type of processing. The line in our .htaccess file looks like below:

Now, we’re processing the image with a script and can do whatever we’d like to with it. Setting a cookie is trivial, as is recording the IP address to a database and looking up pricing to display. We’ve made jokes on images to go along with forum posts, told people when our price is lower than the site using our image, and even let people know that they can get replacement parts for broken items on eBay through our tool parts site. Overall, this method has not only attracted attention to our site with increased visitors by clicking, it’s also increased our brand awareness. Even if people don’t visit us this time, they’ve seen our name so it starts to become familiar down the road.

Of course, one of the side benefits of this is that you can easily pull up a listing of every site that is duplicating your content, down to the page on the site. Take a look at that every once in a while. If you’re logging number of requests, the top requested images from other sites are probably the ones to look at first. Those that were only viewed a couple times may also be checked out, as they may have seen the image from another PC from home and quickly changed it without changing the content. Some sites will need a little help in getting the URL to be formatted the same every time, too. eBay and MySpace are two of the larger examples, but most forums are that way as well. A little massaging can go a long way towards showing the images with a marketing message.

Finally, I’ll leave you this month with a few words of caution on this image modification trick.
1) Blocked By Norton and other non-web referrers are becoming more and more common. Handle this with care.
2) Someone emailing your product page, or even emailing you do yourself, can create a headache if not handled with care.
3) Google, MSN and Yahoo all show cached versions of your page. Make sure you’re not making yourself look foolish by modifying images on your own site viewed through a cache.
4) Not every image needs protection, but the more you’re able to protect from use elsewhere the better prepared for improper use you’ll be.

I hope you enjoy the tips, and happy selling. Until next month…