Complicated on page seo issueincluding duplicate content

Okay here is a head scratcher. I am working for a firm who has had a new website built. It is a great looking site however I have a few problems that I have spotted.

It is a car sales website, first things first i check what pages are indexed in google and it stands at just 8 these being:

www.domain.com
www.domain.com/buy
www.domain.com/sell
www.domain.com/contact
www.domain.com/about
www.domain.com/alerts
www.domain.com/help
www.domain.com/faq

the first thing that grabbed my attention is the 100's of cars do niot seem to have there own indexed pages, these simply appear and operate within the main pages as java script pop ups so know you url change. Is this a missed opportunity to have 100's more indexable pages.


The other issue is that the actual domain redirects to www.domain.com/#landing, this brings up the home page.
The home page is basicly the whole site you simply scroll upwards to the buyers section, downwards to the selling section, further down to about us section etc (basicly all pages are viewable as parts of the homepage). So you when you view the source code you see all the content of the site which concerns me. If you the click on the page titles, they simply move you to the correct part of the page and the url goes to /#about for example.

I understand that this site therefore has the html appearance of a single page because it is simply using one page with the # taking you to the correct areas, and the pages which are indexed by google you can not even get to, however if you go to them pages by directly typing in the url that page is simply the appropriate segment of the hompage however you can not scroll up and down but it is still duplicate content.

So in conclusion a large site seems to have a duplicate content issue, hardly any accessible pages and hardly any content for google to read, is this the conclusion you would draw from it or does it not matter to much, I will be doing the off site seo and if the sites weak my jobs 10 x harder

It doesn't sound like duplicate content is an issue, as the # name links won't be seen as different URLs.

Having the pages for every car indexable is a hard one because cars will be sold and their page will no longer exist. Unless you keep the page and end up with a lot of pages saying "sold".

Looking at some big time car sales websites, they seem to have their own URL for each ad, and it will say "no longer available" when it is done, so this could be the way to go.

At the least, it could be worth having indexable category type pages e.g. BMW, Toyota...

Thanks for the reply jimmyr,

In terms of the duplicate content, I am not saying it is duplicated in terms of the # issue, it is duplicated in the fact that the single home page displays all the content and then the other pages that are indexed by google eg) domain.co.uk/buy (no hashtag) are duplicates of parts of the home page. Am I right to think this is an issue that needs addressing

I have kind of a similar question here: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blackhat-lounge/600340-same-page-themes-passing-google-page-ranking-juice.html

Anyone that knows the answer to either one would certainly be apprectiated.

deah1979 said:

Thanks for the reply jimmyr,

In terms of the duplicate content, I am not saying it is duplicated in terms of the # issue, it is duplicated in the fact that the single home page displays all the content and then the other pages that are indexed by google eg) domain.co.uk/buy (no hashtag) are duplicates of parts of the home page. Am I right to think this is an issue that needs addressing

Click to expand...

In that case, you may add rel=canonical to the each page, like blogs.

deah1979 said:

Thanks for the reply jimmyr,

In terms of the duplicate content, I am not saying it is duplicated in terms of the # issue, it is duplicated in the fact that the single home page displays all the content and then the other pages that are indexed by google eg) domain.co.uk/buy (no hashtag) are duplicates of parts of the home page. Am I right to think this is an issue that needs addressing

Click to expand...

Ah yep, missed that. The canonical thing mentioned by deah is the way to go there. It seems like a bit of a pain from a users perspective though. I'd say remove it from the home page.

Again, check out the bigger car/real estate sites and see how they are doing it. They've got lots of money for testing

Te type of website you are dealing with is called a "parallax scrolling effect" website. It is a serious problem for SEO, because it places obstacles to your SEO efforts.

The real solution is to create those pages and simply move the material to the new page and change the links to it. In this way your website will have the normal seo-able pages. its really not complicated at all.

Baring this, you have to live with the limitations of this style website; one URL and title, one h1 tag, and having a lot of general information on the home page instead of being able to focus on specific keywords.

There are things you can do with rel=cannonical tags, hiding part of the website with Java, or using Robots.txt tag to block content. These solutions are pretty involved, if you can just add the pages, it is best for your SEO efforts and the customers visitor experience to do it.

If you put a lot of imagery on this type of site, it will have page load problems too.

Read up on SEO for scrolling one page websites, and you will be able to get a clearer picture of what you are up against. i avoid them like the plague and just build the pages out.

I would not advise the current website structure for SEO either. From the sounds of it you guys probably need to rebuild the site and focus on an optimized structure.

AJAX isn't the issue. Canonical tags won't be short sided after the fact.