Copying my content

[Paul78]

Hi there,

I run a successful e-commerce website, which the product pages are rich with content linking to other products etc, one of our retailers who sell our products I just noticed copied and pasted the content I have written for these product pages leaving in all the links, which it turn are linking back to my product pages, is this a good thing? or should I make that retailer put in canonical tags?

Thanks for any help

[AlanBleiweiss]

You're facing one of the most challenging issues e-commerce sites face - and here's what I recommend to manufacturers -

Using canonical references might be beneficial to your site, however it leaves retailers unable to rank for those products.  So every retail site that carries your products should have their own unique version of content - completely unique descriptions.  This can be a challenge when there are a lot of products in the database, and of course would not apply to technical specifications within product detail pages, however it's vital for everyone's long term success to get the descriptive text to be truly unique. To the point where the majority of content on each product detail page that is unique outweighs the portion copied (product name, technical specifications, category assigned, etc.).

Whether YOU provide that unique content (and thus control the message), or require that your retailers do the heavy lifting is up to you to decide.

[icecarats]

Going to have to agree with Alan here. I've worked on a lot of ecommerce sites and as the categories fill up with competitors all using the same text it quickly becomes an issue of duplicate content and authorial ownership. What I've seen in the past is cost-sharing, where the manufacturer and the retailer will combine monies to hire authors to make retailer-specific content for those products. In part it depends on the category as well; something like clothing can have just about any old description, but something like a calculator is pretty hard to make sexy.

The links are another question entirely; in a way I don't see how they can do anything but be neutral, or helpful to you right now. It certainly establishes you as the originator of the content too.

[Paul78]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your feedback.

This is becoming more of an issue for me, as we have literraly hundreds of online retailers selling our products, however they do not have the resource in creating new content for these product pages and I certainly don't for hundreds of different websites.

If I could persuade these retailers to put canonical and point it to my product pages would this benefit my SERPs?

[Paul78]

Regarding your last point I am sure I recently watched a WBF were Rand had mentioned this was a good way of getting backlinks, I did question this myself when I heard this.