Another Duplicate Content - eCommerce Question!

[Chris661]

We are manufacturers of about 15 products and our website provides information about the products. We also offer them for sale on the site. Recently we partnered with a large eCommerce site that sells many of these types of products. They lifted descriptions from our site for theirs and are now selling our products. They have higher DA than us.

Will this cause a ranking problem for us? Should we write unique descriptions for them?

Thanks!

[anthonydnelson]

Yes, this certainly could cause issues with your rankings. If the site is more authoritative than yours it certainly could be an issue. I would most certainly provide unique descriptions for them. Especially since this is a small number of products, not thousands of products. Also, focus on improving your content as well. Is there anything additional you could add to your page that would help the user? Perhaps some fresh user reviews or testimonials?

[Eric_Rohrback]

If the content was on your site to begin with (and was already crawled by Googlebot), then you would get credit for the content. If you're the manufacturer, I would think the eComm site would want to rewrite so they could drive sales and stand out from the crowd a bit. I also know it's a challenge in many cases to rewrite content due to vendor restrictions or staffing constraints.

That being said... Unique is always better because it will help the site rank within the same target market as their competitors, and will differentiate from the competition. I wouldn't worry too much about someone using your descriptions, since you should ultimately get authoring credit for the content (in Google's eyes) if it came from you first. All factors being equal, your site would prevail. It's possible you may be outranked for a product term if the other sites are stronger, but that evidence will come with time.

I would recommend asking the eComm site to rewrite/make the content unique, since that would do better for both parties. You're gambling with the same content on multiple sites, so its possible you could be outranked by a distributor. If you don't have restrictions around the content, I would either update your content or ask them to update theirs. Hopefully Google will see your site (the manufacturer) as a more relevant source, but I've seen some pretty funky things in the past so I wouldn't guarantee it.

[Chris661]

Thanks Eric. I am not concerned about the distributor outranking me for the specific product name. Actually I'd prefer they get the sale. I am concerned that Google will in some way "penalize" my site for generic terms related to the category the products are in. The site is intended to be informational / educational and hopefully drive popularity of the products and sales.

And to Anthony's point above, there is additional content on the product pages. Although the reviews are provided by a 3rd party (Shopper Approved) so I don't think they are actually indexed as part of the page. I think it is some JS magic that I don't pretend to understand.

So I guess I am concerned it may look bad overall to Google and they would put us under some sort of Duplicate Content penalty. Is there such a penalty?

Ultimately looks like there's no avoiding writing some fresh copy just to be safe!

[Linda-Vassily]

There is no duplicate content penalty, as such. (Google "duplicate content penalty" for many articles about this.) When Google comes across duplicate content, it simply decides which version should appear in its index and drops the other one(s). This won't affect the high-quality content you have on other parts of your site.

[Jubaer96]

I totally agree with Linda. it won't hurt your site or won't penalize. I think the best solution for this is, just simply ask your partner site to change the product description rel= "author" as your site name. It will help the both sites.