Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality

[Kuantokusta]

Hello everybody,

1. I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc).

What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site...  what do you think?

2. Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ?

Thanks in advance for your opinions!

[LesleyPaone]

1. Correct, it is best not to use manufacturers descriptions alone, you need to water it down with more on page content or you need to have your own written (best case).

2. Ehh, I know it will be contrary to what other people do here, but I always put the 3 products on one page and use combinations to access them. Depending on the platform you use, you can use a query string to set the product displayed by default too. I know a lot of people go for more pages, but I go for more / better content on one page. I don't think the searches between colors of the product will vary enough to warrant 2 more pages. Plus, in e-commerce it can hurt you in the form of lost orders. If someone lands on the wrong color product they might just hit back in google and try the next site.

[BlueprintMarketing]

realistically no one's going to ever build the produce 100% never been written content in the near future because the web is getting too big.

However I don't believe there is a particular percentage that would be ideal. What you should truly do and what Google will know is if you have written it by hand for yourself or have somebody that knows what they're doing right it.

Yes it's true you will not be penalized if you use a manufacturer's description on an e-commerce website however you kind of will penalize yourself because chances are that manufacturers website outranks your domain and Google will simply not take any of what you've written or a.k.a. copied from the manufacturers website into account when ranking your website which will hurt you tremendously.

You must spend the time or money to make a unique description of anything you're selling on an e-commerce website it is crucial. To you having success in the SERPS.

I would use tools like copy scape

http://www.copyscape.com/

this tool will scan the web looking for duplicate content

then you can use another tool made by copy scape called site liner the beta tool however it will give you good insight into your internal site structure and if there is duplicate content there even broken links it's a very cool tool.

http://www.siteliner.com/

their both free however copy scape does offer a version you pay for which allows you to look more deeply into duplicate content issues.

I hope this is of help to you,

Thomas

[MoosaHemani]

For first part: Yes, If the content is around 15% to 20% duplicated its fine but if the two pages are almost identical then Google might not like it and take appropriate actions against it!

For Send Part: If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content, Google preferred you to use canonicalization.

[Njnbiure45r4]

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