Duplicate Content - What's the best bad idea?

[Carlos-R]

Hi all,

I have 1000s of products where the product description is very technical and extremely hard to rewrite or create an unique one.

I'll probably will have to use the contend provided by the brands, which can already be found in dozens of other sites.

My options are:

• Use the Google on/off tags "don't index
  "

• Put the content in an image

Are there any other options?

We'd always write our own unique copy to go with the technical bit.

Cheers

[HeatherBakerTopLine]

Wow, a really tough problem.

I would definitely go for the image, and then customise the copy around the image so you can still rank for those pages. If you go for noindex tags, you lose all optimisation opportunites.

Or, could you host the product description on a single domain and then link to that from all your relevant pages?

[TakeshiYoung]

I would say use the content as is (regular text) and work on adding additional content on top of that. Most marketplaces and etailers (including Amazon) use the descriptions provided by the brands. Google understands that. The idea is to provide additional value on top of that content with things like user reviews and additional features that make your site stand out.

[sprynewmedia]

If the descriptions are very technical then likely there is a fair amount of repetition in the sentence pattern, diction etc.  I'd recommend playing with regex to help transform content into something original.

For instance, you could search for industry abbreviations CW and replace with long forms _**Clockwise (CW).  **_Maybe they over use an adjective that you could changeto your own voice.

Also, perhaps the stock descriptions have blocks of useless content you could strip out in the mean time?

The DB probably has a few other fields (name, product attributes etc) so be sure to find a unique way of assembling the meta description, title and details.

If you find enough to change, I'd think having the description would be better then having a page that is too light on words.

Be sure to mark up with http://schema.org/Product so SE's understand the nature of the content.

EDIT:  I have used the regex technique to enhance the content of a database by added inline tooltips, diagrams or figures and glossary links.  However with Penguin, I would be careful with automated links.  You would only want to create a handful using the same anchor text.

EDIT2: I forgot - MAKE FREQUENT BACK UPS.  Regex is super powerful and can tank a database really fast.  Make a backup of the original and of every successful iteration - it will take a little longer but it will save your butt when things go bad.

[LCNetwork]

I agree with Takeshi, but would also like to add that so-called "Google on/off tags" are a myth. What you have typed out would be an HTML comment (they begin with

[Carlos-R]

Hi - The google on/off tags idea I got it from https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/46/admin_crawl/Preparing

| index | Words between the tags are not indexed as occurring on the current page. | fish shark
mackerel | The words fish and mackerel are indexed for this page, but the occurrence of shark is not indexed.
This page could appear in search results for the term shark only if the word appears elsewhere on the page or in anchortext for links to the page. 
Hyperlinks that appear within these tags are followed. |

[sprynewmedia]

This applies to Google Mini or Search Appliance which are custom search tools for an individual website.

They allow site owners to sculpt the indexing of their private set ups.

Adwords also has something to help indicate the important content for determining the page topic for relating ads.

However, they don't apply to Googlebot spidering as mentioned above.