Using Brand Descriptions

[twitime]

We have an online site with approximately 800 products.  When we add new products we typically use the photos and product description provided by the brand.  The problem is there are numerous other sites using the same descriptions.  All other content on the site is original.

Is having small blocks of content that are the same on multiple sites likely to cause problems with Google?

[anthonydnelson]

No, this won't cause problems big problems, assuming your original content makes up a good chunk of the overall page content. Would it be better if you had your own descriptions and photos? Yes.

I know it's hard to scale writing unique descriptions or taking photos for products, so you should focus on a smaller chunk. Find a way to prioritize the products you want to boost. Maybe it's keyword volume, best sellers, high margin, or a combo of each. Write unique descriptions for 20-50 of them. See if it improves organic performance. If you see an ROI, move on to the next batch of products.

[MonicaOConnor]

This is something that I am very familiar with. We are in almost the exact same situation. Matt Cutts at Google is pretty responsive on this subject. Here is a video where he describes in detail how Google views duplicate content : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA

My professional opinion is that you should try to get as much unique content on the page as possible. I have been successful at getting my customer reviews to appear on site and in the source code of the page. I believe this has directly helped the rankings of my product pages. If everyone has the same content there is really nothing to separate its relevancy in the eyes of the engine and most times the searcher as well. If you are all on the same level where is your competition? What sets you apart from their pages.

Customer reviews, in my opinion, are the holy grail of on page content. If you have no product reviews (tsk tsk) then you can implement in house reviews, like a manager's review or have someone in the company write, in their own words, some informative article between 500-600 words to help give you content that is unique.

Content is king, even duplicate relevant content can be harmful in my opinion. Just because it won't cause a Panda penalty doesn't necessarily mean that the content isn't negatively effecting your SEO.