Duplicate Content

[Mike.NW]

Hi All,

I am doing work for a rug company that acts as a third party. They have close to 4,000+ products.

Each rug belongs to a collection. The collection has one main description that is the same throughout every rug in the collection.

Ex. One Collection has 15 rugs, all with the same description.

Should I take the time and change every single description? I think the answer is yes but I wanted another opinion.

Thanks

[LesleyPaone]

If by collection you mean sizes, then I would move all of the sizes for one collection on the same page and use a drop down to have people select the sizes. That would give you the best benefit without risking thin or duplicate content.

[Whebb]

Hello,

Are they different rugs or just a variation of the same rug? If they are different, then ideally yes, each product should have its own description. If they are a variation then you should look to consolidate these pages into one and make the differences into options for that particular rug.

Hope that helps.

[irvingw]

Just to add a little bit to the previous responses. Assuming each rug is truly different, then you could have on each product page: a general paragraph about the collection and an unique paragraph about each individual product. I would advise using schema tags (http://schema.org/IndividualProduct) and try to figure out which fields can truly be unique per item. Unique photos and videos for your products is also helpful in providing uniqueness to your pages. I realize that 4k is a lot of product to have unique descriptions and you can noindex non-unique pages until you update them.

[Mike.NW]

They are different rugs. However, when I look at competing websites like Rugs USA or Rugs direct they have the same content spread across multiple pages as well.

Do they just take the hit?

[Mike.NW]

Look at above comment under jStong

[Vizergy]

I checked Rugs USA.  They are using Canonical Tags to point to a general page for like products.  They are also using the Schema Product tags that Irving suggested.  I do not believe they are taking a hit - they took the time to set it all up.

[irvingw]

The Google algorithms are very complex. There are many factors that are taken into account for Google ranking positions like trusted backlinks, age of site, percentage of healthy content, schema markup and more. New sites have a barrier to entry and must prove they are worthy of being shown in the SERPS.

[Whebb]

Hard to say if they are taking a 'hit' of any kind. Just from checking Rugs USA, while there is some duplicate content the different product pages are not identical (there are different product titles, images, size options, prices, reviews, etc) so there may not be enough to consider it a 'duplicate content'. To be safe, you always want things like descriptions to be unique, and not duplicate, but that in and of itself may not be enough to draw the duplicate content penalty.