Questions
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Will duplicate product information paragraphs negatively impact our site?
I wouldn't say there would be massive chances of a penalty here, that being said it's an area where you could be 'adding value' and uniqueness to your pages and you're not doing it. So your pages may be 'less competitive' and you may be missing out on an opportunity. It's more of a competitive missed opportunity than an 'error' per-se In reality you should have one product page for each product and then just have 'product variants' for stuff like quantity, size, colour etc. On the modern web people find this easier to navigate and since many sites do offer that, they might seem like more competitive places to shop for paint cans than your site. Price does matter, but it's not the sole arbiter of how products are ranked on Google's search engine - other stuff matters too. Unless you have a virtual monopoly on the product (only you can sell it, or only you can sell it at a greatly discounted price due to a special relationship with the supplier) then I would consider the UX and design of your site. No one wants an 'arse-ache' of a browsing experience Many tools will flag what you are about to do as duplicate content and they're technically right. But instead of going on some crazy copy-writing crusade, think about the architecture of your site. You can still have separate URLs for different product variations if you want, even via parameter-variables (though that's a bit of a 'basic' implementation). If you make it clear to Google through new, more streamlined architecture that they're all actually the same product, the duplicate description(s) won't matter 'as much' (though they'll still be a missed opportunity for more diverse rankings IMO) You can make it even more apparent to Google that all the different variations are actually the 'same product' by utilising Product schema and some of the deeper stuff like ProductModel which will bind it all together. Whatever you implement, test it here. If this tool throws errors and warnings, keep working away until they're all fixed Canonical tags are another option but they will decrease your ranking 'footprint' and in this case I wouldn't recommend them, despite 'slight' content duplication risk (which in reality, are mostly negligible) Final note: you say you have 'unique' descriptions, but remember if they're used elsewhere online they're not unique. If they're unique internally that's great, but if you got them all from a supplier then... obviously loads of other sites are probably using them, which could easily be a big issue for you
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