What is the better of 2 evils? Duplicate Product Descriptions or Thin Content?
-
It is quite labour intensive to come up with product descriptions for all of our product range ... +2500 products, in English and Spanish...
When we started, we copy pasted manufacturer descriptions so they are not unique (on the web), plus some of them repeat each other -
We are getting unique content written but its going to be a long process, so, what is the best of 2 evils, lots of duplicate non unique content or remove it and get a very small phrase from the database of unique thin content?
Thanks!
-
Very good answer - and yes, 2 bad choices but limited resources means I must choose one. Either that or Meta NOINDEX the dupes for the moment until they are re-written.
-
Good idea. Thank you.
-
I agree with you Kurt. In our space we see duplicate content everywhere, from manufacturer's sites to vendors to resellers. There is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." Google doesn't penalize duplicate content. They may choose to ignore it, which may feel like a penalty, but that's not technically what's going on.
I also agree with EGOL. If getting a lot of product descriptions is a daunting task, hire some writers. You can get it done for way less that you think. Need inspiration? Watch Fabio's video from MozCon 2012 where in 15-minutes he describes how he and his team created thousands of unique product descriptions in a very short amount of time without spending a lot of money: http://moz.com/videos/e-commerse-seo-tips-and-tricks
Cheers!
Dana
-
I'd take duplicate content over thin content. There are tons of eCommerce sites out there with duplicate product descriptions. I don't think that Google is going to penalize you, per se, they just might not include your pages in the search results in favor of whatever site they think is the originator of the content.
The reason I think duplicate content is better is users. Either way your search traffic is probably not going to be too great. With duplicate, the SE's may ignore your pages and with thin content you haven't given them a reason to rank you. But at least with some real content on the pages you may be be able to convert the visitors you do get.
That said, I like Egol's suggestion. Don't write new product descriptions yourself. Hire a bunch of people to do it so they can crank out the new content real quick.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Tom... that is some of the best that I have seen in a long time.
Thanks!
-
Nothing like a bit of hyperbole to brighten up a Tuesday, is there?!
-
I'd rather deal with the duplicate content. Personally I'd bounce quicker with Thin or no content than I would with the same content on a different but similar product page. Of course I wouldn't let the duplicate content sit there and hurt me... I'd add canonicals to pages that were similar. Now if it was the exact same content everywhere then that'd drive me nuts. But if I can look at all the products, realize how many are the same with a minor variation and how many truly different product types... then I could write content for fewer pages and consolidate link equity with the canonical without worrying about duplicate content penalizing me. Of course I could always just NoIndex those duplicate pages instead.
-
With a gun to my head....
lol... Wow. That is a great way to word this.
So, my response is, yes, put a gun to my head and I will pick between these two bad choices.
Really, if you are paying someone to write all of this content you can hire one writer and have them take a year to do it... or you can hire 12 writers and have the job done in a month. Same cost either way.
-
With a gun to my head - I'd say thin content is "better" than mass duplicate content.
This is only based on helping to remove penalties from clients' sites - I see more instances of a Panda penalty when duplicate content is present rather than 'thin' content, as it were.
However, it's important to understand how the algorithm works. It will penalise pages based on content similarity - so if a page has thin content on it - ie not a lot to differentiate it from another page on the domain - technically, Google will see it as a duplicate page, with thin content on it.
Now, my line of thinking is that if there is more content on the page, but the majority of it is duplicate - ie physically more duplicate content on the page - then Google would see this as "worse". Similarly, taking product descriptions from one domain to another, and having duplicate content from other domains, seems to be penalised more frequently than the Panda algorithm than just thin-content pages (at least in my experience).
Your mileage may vary on this, but if forced into a temporary solution, thin content may be better for SEO - but conversely worse for a user, as there is less about the product on the page. The best solution of course will be to rewrite the descriptions, but obviously there's a need for a temporary solution.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Could duplicate (copied) content actually hurt a domain?
Hi 🙂 I run a small wordpress multisite network where the main site which is an informative portal about the Langhe region in Italy, and the subsites are websites of small local companies in the tourism and wine/food niche. As an additional service for those who build a website with us, I was thinking about giving them the possibility to use some ouf our portal's content (such as sights, events etc) on their website, in an automatic way. Not as an "SEO" plus, but more as a service for their current users/visitors base: so if you have a B&B you can have on your site an "events" section with curated content, or a section about thing to see (monuments, parks, museums, etc) in that area, so that your visitors can enjoy reading some content about the territory. I was wondering if, apart from NOT being benefical, it would be BAD from an SEO point of view... ie: if they could be actually penlized by google. Thanks 🙂 Best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Enrico_Cassinelli0 -
Duplicate content question
Hi there, I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve. When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate. What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this? Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page? Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues with Google?
We have 1000s of audio book titles at our Web store. Google's Panda de-valued our site some time ago because, I believe, of duplicate content. We get our descriptions from the publishers which means a good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen
deal of our description pages are the same as the publishers = duplicate content according to Google. Although re-writing each description of the products we offer is a daunting, almost impossible task, I am thinking of re-writing publishers' descriptions using The Best Spinner software which allows me to replace some of the publishers' words with synonyms. I have re-written one audio book title's description resulting in 8% unique content from the original in 520 words. I did a CopyScape Check and it reported "65 duplicates." CopyScape appears to be reporting duplicates of words and phrases within sentences and paragraphs. I see very little duplicate content of full sentences
or paragraphs. Does anyone know whether Google's duplicate content algorithm is the same or similar to CopyScape's? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from CopyScape's duplicate content algorithm? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from Google's duplicate content algorithm?0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Syndicating duplicate content descriptions - Can these be canonicalised?
Hi there, I have a site that contains descriptions of accommodation and we also use this content to syndicate to our partner sites. They then use this content to fill their descriptions on the same accommodation locations. I have looked at copyscape and Google and this does appear as duplicate content across these partnered sites. I do understand as well that certain kinds of content will not impact Google's duplication issue such as locations, addresses, opening times those kind of things, but would actual descriptions of a location around 250 words long be seen and penalised as duplicate content? Also is there a possible way to canonicalise this content so that Google can see it relates back to our original site? The only other way I can think of getting round a duplicate content issue like this is ordering the external sites to use tags like blockquotes and cite tags around the content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MalcolmGibb0 -
Duplicate content that looks unique
OK, bit of an odd one. The SEOmoz crawler has flagged the following pages up as duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea what's going on? http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/november-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-winter-insulation http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/july-2011/telephone-issues-$9-2nd-july-2011 http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-nordic-walking-poles http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1 -
Avoiding duplicate content on an ecommerce site
Hi all, I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories. Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMoore850