How to deal with duplicate content

[corn2015]

HI,
A client wants to start selling wordpress sites that are preloaded with products and content. He has over 2.000 products on the site. It's a site we've redone in wordpress that was coldfusion based. Is there any easy automated way to alter the product descriptions without having to edit each one manually? The descriptions will still need to be understandable. How bad can duplicate content hurt you in google?

Corn

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi Corn,

I think you already know the answer to this one... you're going to have to go through each product manually and make sure every description is unique and informative for potential clients. You can't automate decent content. If you don't have the resource to do this, think about outsourcing the work via PeoplePerHour or Fiverr.

Ignore duplicate content at your peril. But, in my opinion, it's not worth the risk.

Cheers,

Lewis

[Lumina]

To expand on what Lewis is saying, automated content is pretty much the exact opposite of unique and rich content. There is absolutely no way to achieve good content goals through automating this way, even if automation itself were an option.

Duplicate content signals to Google that you're either automating it, stealing it, or simply don't have content worth viewing. It has a huge impact on your rankings, but more importantly, it has a huge impact on your visitors/customers. Think of it this way: would you shop on Amazon if every product description and deeper content section was more or less the same?