Product Description Blurb on Category Page

[frankandmaven]

Hey Everyone,

Working with a client who currently has category pages that contain its respective product's description (or about 30 words from it) in each of their product blocks on that category page. We are currently playing with the idea of switching it down to just being the product title and image. We think this will be much more aesthetically pleasing, but aren't sure if it will effect our SEO either negatively or positively.

A couple of things to note:

1. The category pages have a description (many of them still need work, but they are unique).
2. The product's description inside the product block is duplicate content of the first 30 or so words on the product page.

If you have 30 products on the page, you end up with a page that contains about 900 words + the unique description at the top of the page. Will dropping those 900 words hurt our SEO?

[CleverPhD]

It might or it might not.  I would test it on a single page and see.   The other thing you have to consider is that on the current category page you are just reposting duplicate content (descriptions) from the product page.  Google may not consider that to be exceptional to start with.   See if there is a way on the category page to post some original text on the category itself.  Make it a real hub information page that people would want to share and link to.

[PeteC12]

You may want to see the latest google webmaster hangout . John Mueller answers a question about this type of topic. You may also want to see the seo journal article linked to this.

John Mueller has also stated a number of times that there is no duplicate penalty as such but my interpretation of that is that you wont rank as well as the original source. Many affiliate sites suffer from this kind of thing as they are share the same product descriptions etc.

Pete