Do product pages need unique content or does having duplcate content hurt on those pages?

[gallreddy]

We are adding product rapidly to our website but this requires allowing duplicate to exist on our product pages of furniture-online.com.  From an SEO standpoint do we need to make this content unique for each product.  Since we aren't link building to specific product pages and we don't anticipate product pages being found in a search result, are we ok leaving the duplicate content in place and spending our dollars elsewhere?

[seomasterbrasil]

Hello Garth,

When working with e-commerce sites, they have some unique needs.

In this case, you have some pages that shows some similar products, but with different colors, shapes. But in the end, you have to use the same content for usability, to let the user with some standardized layout.

So, the Search Engines understands this need and in this case we should use the rel="canonical" attribute, to tell them that the targeted page is the most important one.

The canonical should be inserted in the HEAD of all your products directing to it's category page, like this:

In a page of a specific Conference Table, you should use the category page in the tag below:

Read this to learn more: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

Hope it helps!

=]

[gallreddy]

Hildebrando,

Thanks so much for that info.  That helps a ton.  Just so I perfectly understand.  We are getting product descriptions and product specs for 1,000 products from a specific manufacturer and loading that content onto out site.  Our competitors of ours have already done the exact same thing.

So if we look at one specific product on our site, the content of that product page is duplicated on 35 of our competitors sites.  So all of us have the exact content for that product page.  None of us have that product listed more than one on our sites, so it isn't an internal site duplicate content problem with the same product being listed multiple times on 1 site, but the problem exists between 35 different sites. Does the canonical attribute resolve that duplicate content issue?

All of our category pages and sub category pages have unique content.

Thanks, Garth

[seomasterbrasil]

You're welcome!

I understand your problem, and the canonical cannot solve it. It only works for internal duplicate content.

I saw something about a external canonical, but it looks like you're going to pass your relevance to another site, and you don't want that!  ; )

Do you and your competitors have too many duplicated content?

I would suggest you to write your own content in the cases of external duplicate content, and this way go ahead of your competitors!

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