One of the challenges I've faced at iAmplify is developing an SEO strategy for our partner stores. Our business model hinges upon our partners' success. So for some of our larger partners, we will build a custom store that is hosted by us, but utilizes their branding. One of my responsibilities is to create meta data (URL keywords, title tags, meta keywords) for these stores. With Partner or Co-branded Stores there can be an issue with duplicate content as it relates to search engine rankings. If Google finds duplicate content on multiple landing pages under the same domain, it will make an educated guess about which page to present in the search results. Not only do you lose control over which listing you want to show up in the search results, having your content divided between several different pages essentially pokes holes in any weight the original content held as an authoritative results page for a specific keyword search. One of the ways to combat this issue is to "nofollow" the duplicate content pages. I carefully considered this option. But I didn't move forward with it for a couple of reasons, one of which I will detail below.

Since joining iAmplify, I've worked tirelessly with our technology team to improve our main site's search engine rankings. By improving the site's architecture, title tags, url structure etc. our traffic has increased by over 100%. However, since the company's focus right now is on our experts' sites rather than our native site, we have chosen not to make changes to the native site that would most certainly help improve conversion rates. So the increase in traffic to our site has not been met with an equal increase in sales. Meanwhile, having the Partner Store -- with duplicate content, yet often better built and merchandised -- show up higher in the search results than our native site is actually a plus, because that site will generally convert much better. Right now, I actually want our partner store results to show up before our native site results.

So for now, I've let the duplicate content remain. Until we have multiple sites with the same content and it clearly starts to affect our search engine rankings, there is no reason to block or filter the content. Once we add many more partner stores that feature the same content or we improve our native site's conversion rates, I will reconsider the nofollow solution.

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