Product Descriptions & SEO

[MrPenguin]

I got another small question for my price comparison website that I run

An example product from my site, to which this question relates http://goo.gl/XDTUNs

I have about 600 products which I track, and the product description I have for each is as follows;

Paragraph 1 - Standard copy which is contained on all products, only the product name / keyword is changed "Easily compare prices below on a XXX"

Paragraph 2 = Blatant, 100% copy of the product description from Amazon

Paragraph 3 - Standard copy which is contained on all products, only the product name / keyword is changed "Always read your chosen stores product description before buying your XXX"

Firstly, I am now on a mission to create unique descriptions instead of the Amazon ones I foolishly copied. My question is, are the standard paragraph 1 and 3 which are in all my product ok? Or should this be avoided?

Should my unique description be paragraph 1, or can it remain in the middle?

The reason for the three separate paragraphs was so I could mention to keyword 3 times, which is what is suggested on the Moz page grader.

Thanks so much!

[WesleySmits]

Hello Mark,

This could potentially lead to duplicate / thin content issues on your site which could harm your ranking.
At the end you mentioned that you choose three paragraphs like this to mention the keyword three times because the Moz Page Grader told you so. The tool is merely a helpful hint towards an optimized page.

You should always write the content for the user and not for the search engine. A good piece of text about a certain subject will naturally contain the keyword several times. Three is a good average which is indicated by the Page Grader.

Writing your own descriptions of the content is a good idea instead of the Amazon ones even though it sounds like it's gonna be a lot of work to do so. Whenever possible try to write a fully unique piece of text of 300 words or so for each product. This is a pain to do, but in terms of SEO it will do wonders above standard templates.

[TakeshiYoung]

A little bit of templatized text shouldn't hurt, as long as you have sufficient unique content that distinguishes the page. If you have different categories of content, you could also create several different templates for each category to mix things up.

[JCurrier]

Hi Mark,

A lot of sites use product descriptions either provided by the distributor or found on large e-commerce sites, like Amazon. However, this doesn't necessarily help you stand out.

You could leave the common description you have so far and then expand a little further using your own content. I'd definitely take Takeshi's advice on making some standard copy for certain categories with lots of products.

[KaneJamison]

Good comments from the others here.

Focus on the unique description as the primary one shown to users (further up the page) unless the manufacturer's is better. You can also label that as "Manufacturer's Description:" to differentiate it from the content you wrote. Some users will even hide it on a tab that is crawlable but has to be clicked by the user, which is fine.

As Takeshi mentioned, the small amount of duplicated/templated text should be a problem as long as it's not 80% of the page content.

[Dr-Pete]

Agreed - the keyword usage guideline is just a guideline - if it's leading to a high ratio of thin-to-unique content, I'd probably not worry about. In other words, I'd drop some of the thin content. As others said, it's more of a ratio situation and a bit gray - the more unique content you can get in that second paragraph that adds value, the better. As it stands, these pages are certainly looking a little thin.