Are Duplicate Miva Merchant Pages on Your Site A Problem for Seach Engines?
It has been claimed in the past from various sources that having both Miva Merchant dynamic pages and their static counterparts can cause problems in the search engines because of mirror page penalties. Their solution to this alleged problem is to ban search engines from indexing their client's Miva Merchant pages. Here are some thoughts on the matter.
In 100% of these instances, no examples can be given since they always remove Miva Merchant pages from being indexed.
Mirror content refers more to copying your pages and putting them on other websites and not on your own website. Different types of links to the same content also do not fall into this category (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=foo vs http://yourdomain.com/page/store_code/foo).
Coincidentally, one of the companies that adheres to this belief recommends duplicating your Miva Merchant pages to be placed on affiliate's websites and other domains which is definitely spamming.
The two oldest static page generators, Statcat and SEK, do not create exact duplicates. The only static page generator that creates exact duplicates is Merchant Optimizer which is more for reducing load on your server and not search engine optimization.
JMH has had clients for 2 and over 3 years with duplicate or similar content on the same domain with no penalty whatsoever. Many of these cases involve Search Engine Killer (SEK2). In fact, one client increased their sales by 500% using this method.
*UPDATE - One Miva Merchant store owner notified the Miva world that Google had taken severe action against them because of duplicate content on their main domain. They had static versions of their dynamic Miva Merchant pages that were not exact duplicates, but Google informed them that having the page arranged differently but having the same description or content was not allowed either. They also had multiple link styles within their site pointing to products.
"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content"
What to do if You Have Duplicate Pages of the Same Content or More than One Type of Linking Structure
Choose to use either static or dynamic product and category pages.
Choose one type of links to categories and products and remove all others.
Ban Google at the minimum and all search engine spiders at the maximum from crawling either the static or dynamic directories by using the robots.txt file. Obviously, do not block any spider from crawling the pages or directories you choose to use.
Use permanent (301) redirects in your .htaccess file for the old pages and links. If you have too many pages or links to do this individually, create redirects that will work with any pages or links within certain directories and point them to your sitemap page. If you need help with any of this, contact your host or hire an SEO expert like JMH.
Additional Information
Choosing to use either static or dynamic versions of your categories and products can be very specific to each store owner. However, JMH feels that in most cases the dynamic pages should be used. Why go through the trouble if you can optimize your dynamic pages and achieve great results in the search engines? What if you track inventory? What if you have dynamic content that changes? For more information on this, see this month's article on static versus dynamic Miva Merchant pages.
