Do we need to worry about internal duplicate content?

[10dales]

Hi,

I have a question about internal duplicate content.

We have a catalogue of around 4000 products.

Most of these do have individual descriptions but for most of the products they contain a generic summary that includes a sentence to begin with that includes each product name.

We're currently working on descriptions for each product, but as you can imagine it's quite a chore.

I was wondering if there are actually any penalties for this or whether we can ignore the crawl errors from the moz report?

Thanks in Advance!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

There's a great resource from Inflow that can help you go through your site's potential eCommerce duplicate content issues. I would recommend you checking it out here.

You should also read and understand Google's duplicate content resources.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Something of a sticky one, because Juhn Mueller said:

“We don’t have a duplicate content penalty. It’s not that we would demote a site for having a lot of duplicate content.

So to answer your question:

I was wondering if there are actually any penalties for this

No - there isn't one.

This doesn't mean that duplication is not going to result in a penalty for another reason though. Too much duplication may result in a page quality issue that triggers a different penalty. Too much is also not good for a user experience, but that all depends on where / what content is duplicated.

Have a read of this article over at Hoboweb as there is a ton of great information there.

-Andy