Effects that behavioral skipping has on SEO

Behavioral skipping has become a pain in my side this past year and thought I would spend a few minutes sharing my pain. The logic is, if you have site that produces a page based upon a search you know what I am dealing with.

To provide a frame of reference every single page that you view is actually search result, even though the data seems pretty simple and theoretically easy to produce. But to scale according to a large database, you cannot create 10’s of millions of pages and make sure that they are all doing what you want manually. No one can afford to maintain that type of process. So instead you try and learn the behaviors of users by what they are looking for and try and assume what they want either based upon a click or a search. In this case it’s really the same thing, but the URL’s are different.

It’s amazing to see how wide spread this type of problem is across the net. You can simply go to any major retail site and type in a popular model number of a product. It can be very easy to get 100 results back for a specific ipod, especially when the retailer has tons of sub retailers that ship on their behalf.

It became obviously clear why these sites also do not perform at all in MSN, there was a post about how you can remove your competitors from the MSN index by getting duplicate pages indexed using ?value after each page. With large retail sites you do not have to work hard at this. It becomes very easy to do without anyone else’s help.

Large scale SEO duplicate content test

Do you have a large e-commerce site and think that you have your duplicate content under control? Here is a great and simple way to be sure; I would veer to bet that you are probably wrong assuming all is well.

Let’s pick on the largest e-commerce site as a test. Our friends at Amazon.com

First step, pick a manufacturer’s part number. It’s an easy way to assume you are looking at the same product. In this case I am going to use a very new IPOD, model # MA446LL/A.

Simply type in site:amazon.com MA446LL/A and you will find a large list of fairly similar pages. Some not so similar, but all in all why do you need 338 pages about one product?

I tried the same thing on buy.com and found 6 results, most in the supplemental listings, not so good. But they are not known for being strong at SEO.

Duplicate content – Shingles

Boogybonbon.com has posted a very interesting article on duplicate content. In this case the reference to Shingles is a block of text that has been directly copied from one site to another. In some cases people use shingles and simply replace keywords that they feel are more appropriate for the page that they are placing it on.

There is a general theory that if you add unique content around this Shingle you can make the content seems more worth while. This article points out that this is not the case and if you wish to use a Shingle, you need to edit the Shingle significantly.

I completely agree with this data and furthermore have had successful examples of this with one of my Billiard sites. When I first launched my Billiard site I would take the content from the manufacturer and place it on my site. Having almost no positive SEO benefits, I attempted to add additional content to the pages which had a nominal lift. When I completely re-wrote each product they sky rocketed up in the rankings. Obviously I used the manufactures specs within my content since it wouldn’t make sense to use other incorrect data.

Interesting read, added it to my home page reader.