E-commerce site product descriptions and duplicate content

[valuepets]

Hi everyone.

I'm developing an e-commerce site using Prestashop and concerned about the issue of duplicate content among product descriptions. My main concerns are:

• If there are 500 or more products and those product descriptions are obtained from a manufacturer or supplier's website hence running into external duplicate content issues.

• Internal duplicate content is also an issue, if there are multiple similar products and each product has the same description across several pages.

What would be the best approach to eliminate the possibility of incurring a duplicate content penalty due to similar product descriptions?

I've already considered the suggestion of noindex-ing the complete range of products to help protect from duplicate content penalties and having unique articles written in the site blog discussing products instead linking to certain products on the site.

Another consideration I had was noindex-ing all product pages except pages for featured products in the store and rewriting descriptions for a set amount of those featured products regularly (this will still have the problem of internal duplicate content across pages if similar product descriptions are rewritten).

The product range is intended to be very large so I'm really seeking an alternative solution from the insane task of rewriting many product descriptions. Any suggestions to make SEO work efficient are very much welcome and appreciated.

Thank you!

[David_ODonnell]

Have you considered scaling the task, rewriting perhaps the top 20% of products to begin with?

It is a massive undertaking, but I think you'll find it'll be worth it.

[valuepets]

Hi David,

That was one of the options we were considering and keeping the remaining 80% out of the index to ensure we wouldn't be penalised for DC because for I know for a fact in most cases if we use the content provided ny the manufacturer we will be stumped for DC, as every other Joe is using it.

Thanks for your input.