Shall I change duplicated product descriptions if I am top ranking result and was first to publish it?
-
about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites).
The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well.
Which of the following options would you opt for?
- keeping the description and just adding some unique content
- replacing the complete product description by a new one
-
thanks everybody.
excellent advice. I will just limit to make some tests of products for now to see how it will affect ranking. -
This is the best answer. It puts you in a great position as well since it means that a lot of your competitors that are using the same feed will not show up in the SERP's as well. I would expand my monitoring out to more products though and see how you are doing with them.
-
No way - you don't mess around when you are already ranking #1.
Only do that if your rankings tank.
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
-
Least expensive, correctly done way to hire product descriptions done.
Hello, WHAT WE NEED NOW: We need 300 product descriptions done. We have reached the point where we're hiring this done. How would you recommend we go about this. 200 products will be rewriting the supplier's product descriptions (one sentence each) and filling out a quicktable. There's just nothing to do there, no information anywhere. About 100 products will be where the person writing the description and filling out the table will have to google the product's manufacturer and rewrite the information off of that website in an intelligible, interesting, paragraph that is informative. Would you recommend we hire someone local to come work in our office that specializes in our niche, or are there any GOOD services out there for our case, even if it's just for the first 200. OUR FUTURE PLANS: We'll guess at the top few products and do some 10X work ourselves. No hiring needed there. Once we know the top 50 products we will do some more deep hiring for 10X product descriptions, but that can wait. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW1 -
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Mystery: Ranking in Amazon for a product page?
My client has a product on Amazon that has more reviews and better rankings. However, their competitor with less reviews and lower ratings are ranking #1 for our primary keyword in Google. Our product page doesn't even rank on Google, but I'm assuming Google doesn't want to display two results from Amazon. The only difference is they have 1 link pointed to the product page that has a small PA of 10 and DA of 15. Do you think this link could be the only thing making a difference? Should we start building more links to this product page in addition to their website? Any other tips to help our Amazon page rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stryde0 -
Duplicated Pages and Forums
Does duplicate content hurt that particular duplicated content, or the entire site? There are some parts of my site that I don’t care about getting high rankings on search engines. For example, I have a forum and there are certain links that only logged in people can see. If you aren’t logged in, they will take you to a page where it tells u to log in. google, obviously not logged in, interprets this as lots and lots of the same duplicated page. Should I just leave it alone cause I dont care if those pages makes it to search engines. Will it not hurt the entire site? For example, can my homepage search rankings decrase? That leads to my next question. What is the best way to optimize a forum? Whenever someone posts a new post, it seems another url for the same forum thread is created..... which is obviously duplicated….in other words, if like 20 people post on a thread, i believe my site adds 20 urls for that page...anyone know how to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Changing my url name? Should I do it?
Hi, I am targeting a brand called Creative Recreation, who are a trainers brand. We currently rank ok-ish for certain terms for Creative Recreation Trainers, Footwear and Creative Recreation [INSERT STYLE NAME HERE]. Our main search term I think we would like to improve on is "creative recreation trainers" as we are 6th for this. Our domain name points to the brands page as designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/creative-recreation/ Now what I want to know is, would it be worthwhile or would it affect my current rank/index if I changed the end of that url to read /creative-recreation-trainers/ thus getting the keyword phrase in the url? Creative-Recreation is a hard one to crack as you have a lot of competition from the brands site etc.. Any ideas on this? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
Hello, I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display. In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products. The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up). What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct? ---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO --------- The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...) Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination). Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two. Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product. The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012... Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar. Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's? Thanks0 -
How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs. Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanperea1000