Creating multiple identical pages for Zoom search results

[frodojrr]

I just finished a massive project by my standards:

http://www.hhhincorporated.com

This site has it all: Shopping Cart, "Design a Container" where you can drag stickers to the various bins and change the color of the bins, a nice blog, etc.

We're using the Zoom Search Engine.

The client every sticker he sells to show up separately in the search results. His intention is to do something like this:

The client wants to create individual pages for each sticker, using the pages I created for the main part of the site. So, there would be seven pages identical to this one, for example:

http://www.hhhincorporated.com/conta...k-numbers.html

The main page, listed above, would be the only one attached to the menu. He would have six other identical pages, each named for one sticker on that page:

http://www.hhhincorporated.com/4-inch-black-number-0-decal.html would get the following thumbnail in the search results:

http://www.hhhincorporated.com/thumbs/4-inch-black-number-0-decal.jpg

The only difference between all the pages would be the name of the page. He says this worked for him on his previous site.

All the added pages would be linked to the Site Map, and he'd have a better chance for someone searching for a No. 4 sticker landing on this page from Google.

Does this sound like an SEO nightmare, or a clever idea? How would Zoom respond to this? The client intends to use Zoom to give greater weight to certain pages.

[Ray]

What he is suggesting is usually implemented with what is known as "URL Rewriting". This is a web server configuration that allows multiple URLs to serve the same page, or just change the URL for a page to what you want it to be.

This is described in detail online, including this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_engine

Here's the Apache guide to URL Rewriting:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

You almost certainly don't want to create duplicate pages to achieve this. You're not only wasting space, it's a maintenance nightmare - when you want to make a change on one page, you have to remember to update all the duplicate pages.

URL rewriting achieves everything that your duplicating idea achieves. Note that it's not the same as redirecting URLs.

Having said that, either of the above would cause Zoom to index multiple pages so long as you have "Use CRC to skip files with identical content" disabled.

But it's not really ideal. You're going to have multiple results which look identical in the search results, but they'll just have different URLs and filenames.

You really want different titles and diffferent meta descriptions for each page. Otherwise the user will just be confronted with a mass of results and unlikely to look at the filename to determine which is the one they want.

If you really want every item to appear individually, you really should have every item on an independent page, with it's own title, and it's own meta description, etc. You could have "grouping" pages like you do at the moment for convenience, and skip those in the search engine (via Skip Page list in Zoom, or robots.txt for external search engines).