On Altrec, organic search traffic had started dropping precipitously. Customers were not finding what they were looking for on our site through organic search. From one day to the next, Altrec.com's Y/Y organic traffic from Google went down by nearly 40%. It wasn't clear at first why, but after weeks of digging, research, a few beers and a few tears, things started coming into focus: duplicate content had been flagged with the most recent Google algorithm updates. The duplicate pages for both products and listviews were caused by several issues:
Most glaring of the issues on Altrec, the outlet subdomain contained duplicate copies of a majority of our product and listview pages. All had to be addressed quickly to again get customers finding the products they were looking for via organic search.
On the MotoSport site, similar issues became quickly apparent, but even more widespread. With many different 'storefronts' for each motorcycle type, the product url duplication caused the Google Index to grow to over 30 million before deduplication work began.
As a customer using organic search, I want to find what I'm looking for with the fewest number of results, because too many matches is confusing and overwhelming
Removing duplicate content required a complete rethinking of the code to run the Altrec Outlet: product pages would each live under a single url; outlet listview pages would be a faceted version of the main pages; canonical tags, noindex tags, pagination and sitemaps all had to be rebuilt. In addition, each duplicate url would need to be properly redirected to the the preferred url to indicate the best page.
Because Altrec was pushing against the tide of a SERP downgrade, we rolled out changes continually as the fixes were developed. Each version of the old product/listview page was redirected to the best url possible. Most critical was that any crossover redirects all happened in a single 301. Google quickly loses interest when multiple redirects stack on top of each other.
When the Google index for MotoSport had reached a new high (30 million), the time had come for the project to begin again. With analysis of our urls, we found the worst offenders on the product pages, where SEO clarity is most needed. We set up a series of careful redirects for 'store', international urls, 'ride', trailing slashes, etc..
In many cases, MotoSport's best urls could have a few THOUSAND duplicates with the same content.
For Altrec, the index took approximately 6 months to bring into compliance with our new standards and dropped the index by 75% overall. Over the same time, the organic search traffic came back into alignment.
On the MotoSport side, we were able to pare our index down by 50% in the first 3 months with no drop in organic search traffic. The index continues to improve.
While the learning curve was long, the actual development around reducing duplicate content problems was relatively straightforward. The biggest blocker to change was legacy code. It was time to pay the technical debt of old code and there was no easy way to do it.
