Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce Duplicate Product Descriptions across 3 websites
-
Hi,
We are an e commerce company that has our own domain but also sell the same products on eBay and Amazon. What is the feeling on the same exact descriptions being used on different platforms? Do they count as duplicate content? Will our domain be punished/penalised as our domain does not have as much authority as EBay or Amazon?
We have over 5,000 products with our own hand written product descriptions. We want our website to be the main place/ have priority over the above market places. What's the best suggestion/solution?
thanks,
-
Thank you for all your help.
We do think it is down to Ebay and Amazon having more authority over our domain which has in turn bought our rankings down.
As we move forward we'll cut Ebay and Amazon's description down and see how this goes. I guess a long-term strategy would be to write unique content for all. But this is very time consuming for over 5000 unique products.
Thanks,
-
The sure thing is that your domain won't be punished/penalised. But it might affect a bit, so I suggest you to summarize your products' description in order to be sure & without doubts.
Sometimes it's positive to summarize your descriptions because it can make it easier and more comfortable for buyers to read.
-
I agree with Dennis about the changes on Pinterest. They are truely great for webshops.
I do have a little warning though. Ebay and Amazon are really big and authoritive websites which will rank above your own website for those products. There could be duplicate content issues for this and from what i've heard you would get punished for your own descriptions because Amazon and Ebay are so authoritive that you would get the penalty yourself.
So be careful about selling on Amazon and Ebay.
Hope my answer was helpful.
-
Hi Roy
I would make sure the descriptions are different on each. If not, at least make the one's on your page different.
Next would be to make sure your categories have unique description/content as well. It goes a long way.
BTw, no, it's not going to be a duplicate penalty, it will just help you rank them all better and easier.
and with the current tests of google omitting results, you might get your site omitted instead of the copies.
You might also want to take a look at pinterest with your ecom site. Their new changes are amazing
-
Hey Roy,
I haven't worked with ecommerce sites that also sell on stores such as Amazon, but I've found an interesting answer to a question very similar to yours, here: http://moz.com/community/q/amazon-product-descriptions-and-our-website-s-product-descriptions
As a solution, you could try feeding Amazon/Ebay only a small excerpt of the description, and not linking from your main site to the Amazon/Ebay products.
Cheers
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Google ignore duplicate meta descriptions?
Hi there SEO mozzers, I am dealing with a website that has duplicate meta descriptions (we know is bad).As a punishment, Google totally ignores the meta descriptions and picks content from the website and displays it in SERP. I already read the https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description but I was wondering if there is more information/knowledge out there. Any tips are appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
Lazy Loading of products on an E-Commerce Website - Options Needed
Hi Moz Fans. We are in the process of re-designing our product pages and we need to improve the page load speed. Our developers have suggested that we load the associated products on the page using Lazy Loading, While I understand this will certainly have a positive impact on the page load speed I am concerned on the SEO impact. We can have upwards of 50 associated products on a page so need a solution. So far I have found the following solution online which uses Lazy Loading and Escaped Fragments - The concern here is from serving an alternate version to search engines. The solution was developed by Google not only for lazy loading, but for indexing AJAX contents in general.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBGlobalSEO
Here's the official page: Making AJAX Applications Crawlable. The documentation is simple and clear, but in a few words the solution is to use slightly modified URL fragments.
A fragment is the last part of the URL, prefixed by #. Fragments are not propagated to the server, they are used only on the client side to tell the browser to show something, usually to move to a in-page bookmark.
If instead of using # as the prefix, you use #!, this instructs Google to ask the server for a special version of your page using an ugly URL. When the server receives this ugly request, it's your responsibility to send back a static version of the page that renders an HTML snapshot (the not indexed image in our case). It seems complicated but it is not, let's use our gallery as an example. Every gallery thumbnail has to have an hyperlink like: http://www.idea-r.it/...#!blogimage=<image-number></image-number> When the crawler will find this markup will change it to
http://www.idea-r.it/...?_escaped_fragment_=blogimage=<image-number></image-number> Let's take a look at what you have to answer on the server side to provide a valid HTML snapshot.
My implementation uses ASP.NET, but any server technology will be good. var fragment = Request.QueryString[``"_escaped_fragment_"``];``if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(fragment))``{``var escapedParams = fragment.Split(``new``[] { ``'=' });``if (escapedParams.Length == 2)``{``var imageToDisplay = escapedParams[1];``// Render the page with the gallery showing ``// the requested image (statically!)``...``}``} What's rendered is an HTML snapshot, that is a static version of the gallery already positioned on the requested image (server side).
To make it perfect we have to give the user a chance to bookmark the current gallery image.
90% comes for free, we have only to parse the fragment on the client side and show the requested image if (window.location.hash)``{``// NOTE: remove initial #``var fragmentParams = window.location.hash.substring(1).split(``'='``);``var imageToDisplay = fragmentParams[1]``// Render the page with the gallery showing the requested image (dynamically!)``...``} The other option would be to look at a recommendation engine to show a small selection of related products instead. This would cut the total number of related products down. The concern with this one is we are removing a massive chunk of content from he existing pages, Some is not the most relevant but its content. Any advice and discussion welcome 🙂0 -
How to fully index big ecommerce websites (that have deep catalog hierarchy)?
When building very large ecommerce sites, the catalog data can have millions of product SKUs and a massive quantity of hierarchical navigation layers (say 7-10) to get to those SKUs. On such sites, it can be difficult to get them to index substantially. The issue doesn’t appear to be product page content issues. The concern is around the ‘intermediate’ pages -- the many navigation layers between the home page and the product pages that are necessary for a user to funnel down and find the desired product. There are a lot of these intermediate pages and they commonly contain just a few menu links and thin/no content. (It's tough to put fresh-unique-quality content on all the intermediate pages that serve the purpose of helping the user navigate a big catalog.) We've played with NO INDEX, FOLLOW on these pages. But structurally it seems like a site with a lot of intermediate pages containing thin content can result in issues such as shallow site indexing, weak page rank, crawl budget issues, etc. Any creative suggestions on how to tackle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AltosDigital-10 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Pagination duplicate title and meta description
Hello, Getting a lot of duplicate title and meta description errors via google webmaster tools. For best SEO practices, do i no-index the page/2's, page/3's...? More importantly, i see how MOZ did it by adding "page 3" to their titles such as http://moz.com/blog?page=3. Is that a better way of doing it? If so, how do i do that on Yoast SEO? Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Google and Product Description Tabs
How does Google process a product page with description tabs? For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on. Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators? Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Duplicate content on subdomains.
Hi Mozer's, I have a site www.xyz.com and also geo targeted sub domains www.uk.xyz.com, www.india.xyz.com and so on. All the sub domains have the content which is same as the content on the main domain that is www.xyz.com. So, I want to know how can i avoid content duplication. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690