Duplicate Content Issues with Ebay Postings
Duplicate Content Issues with Ebay Postings
It’s embarrasing to admit, being a fairly well known seo company but recently we ran into a duplicate content issue with our site Astonishseo.com posting an ad on Ebay. Below we will explain how it happened as well as how to avoid this yourself.
How it happened
We recently started offering a new service for realestate agent websites called IDX/RETS MLS Real Estate SEO. When we started offering this service, naturally we created a new page on our site devoted to MLS Real Estate SEO and started blogging about it. The site was in Googles index within hours and ranking #1 for “mls seo” and “idx seo”, as well as #3 for “seo for realtors”. These where pretty amazing results for a couple hours of work.
Duplicate content was posted to Ebay
An employee in our company posted a classified ad to Ebay to help get the buzz out as well a backlink. Here is what went wrong. When the employee posted the ad he basically copied and pasted the code from our IDX/RETS MLS SEO page into the Ebay classified ad posted here. To him the ad looked great and was functioning perfectly.
To Google, the exact same content was now on 2 domains and had to make a decision on which one to X out of the SERP’s. Well not much to our surprise Google choose Ebay (page rank 9) over our much lower page ranked site and totally removed our page from the index.
What we plan to do now
Now that we know we have duplicate content on Ebay, we devised a strategy to resolve the issue. Here it is:
- Replace duplicate content on Ebay with fresh content
- Change around our IDX/RETS Page
- Blog about this with links back to both the Ebay listing and our page (doing this now)
- Wait for Google to recrawl and Reindex
Well here is the test and if we thought this out correctly we should be back in Google before the end of the day.
We feel that this will work well because google will get pinged the second this post is published, from there they will crawl the Ebay listing and notice it has been changed, then they will crawl our modified page and see it has changed. Once this is done where reindexed.
Pushing publish now, cross your fingers.
**Update** It’s October 28th the very next day (under 24 hours later) and the page is back up. It is also ranking better than it did before. Check it out “mls seo” #1 Google.
