Duplicate product content/disclaimers for non-e-commerce sites

[sbs219]

This is more a follow-up to Rand's recent Whiteboard "Handling User-Generated & Manufacturer-Required Duplicate Content Across Large Numbers of URLs." I posed my question in the comments, but unsure it will get picked up.

My situation isn't exactly the same, but it's similar:

Our site isn't an e-commerce site and doesn't have user reviews yet, but we do have maybe 8 pages across 2 product categories featuring very similar product features with duplicate verbiage. However, we don't want to re-write it because we want to make it easy for users to compare apples-to-apples to easily see which features are actually different. We also have to run disclaimers at the bottom of each page.\

​Would i-framing the product descriptions and disclaimers be beneficial in this scenario, with the addition of good content?​ It would still be nice to have some crawlable content on those pages, so the i-framing makes me nervous unless we compensate with at least some above-the-fold, useful content that could be indexed.

Thanks, Sarah

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Sarah,

I wouldn't recommend using iframes to deliver the product descriptions. From my experience, sites with small-scale duplicate content issues will consistently perform better than sites with little to no content (which your site ultimately would be if content was delivered via iframe)

There are a few variables that effect things, most importantly the volume of the duplicate content. If it's 8 pages, then I wouldn't consider this a high-risk problem. The solution would be to add as much valuable additional content as you can to these pages, whilst keeping the core (descriptions) content in place.

If I've misunderstood and the scale is much bigger, it may be worth considering an alternative solution. Rather than using alternate content delivery methods, I'd recommend putting your focus on adding additional unique content. Once of the simplest ways of doing this is encouraging (or manually adding) user generated reviews of the two similar products. This way your customers can compare apples with apples in regards to the descriptions, but there's plenty of unique and helpful information on the page too.

I hope that helps

Cheers

[randfish]

Good points David, and I'd agree. If the duplicate content issues are relatively small-scale, I'd generally opt to have that content accessible to the engines, and would work simply to add my own, unique content/value/features to those pages to help make them unique (you may already be doing this through design/UX/etc).