How to handle brand description on product pages?
-
Hi Mozzers,
Hope you're doing good. I have a content placement related question.
Assume, I have 1000 products of brand A, 1000 of brand B, and so on. Now, if I want to put brand specific 200-words description on each of these product pages. I'm creating duplicate content across the site by putting absolutely same brand description on these product pages i.e brand A description on first 1000 pages, brand B description on next 1000 products and so on.
Looking for an expert advice around placement of content here i.e how can I add brand description on product pages and avoid duplicate content penalty? Any help?
-
Sure. Thank you so much for confirming the same.
For the first time today, my recommended solution for a problem was supported by you. I'm really happy about it. "Moving in the right direction" feeling
-
If they insist on having brand information, then yes, the alternative is to have a small portion of brand information, with a link to the full brand text on its own page.
-
Hi Sir Alan,
Thank you so much for your response. I agree, actually I also recommended the same solution of creating new brand pages and then linking them from the product pages but they (product team) wants to show brand description on product pages itself.
Could you please recommend any other solution here? If there can be another way to implement this. Or else, we might show a few words of description there along with a link to brand page.
-
Nitin
200 words - what is the point / value of having that repeated on thousands of pages? It's not unique, and regardless of what some people think about it being okay because "lots of sites do it" or because "Major brand that's able to get away with lots of bad SEO because they own a market" can do it.
If there are two hundred words based on non-product specific information, this is not a best practice. Instead, that information should be contained on just one page, and if you believe, from a user experience perspective, providing a link to that from each product page is helpful, that's what I recommend.
-
Thanks Don. I meant this only.
-
HI Nitin,
Doing a follow up here. So you are worried about a particular section of a page is going to be considered duplicate? If so, then that is of no worry, it is normal for many pages to have the same information when it pertains to the overall intent of the page. What is looked at is the page in whole not a section of it.
If that is not what you mean please give me an example so I can help identify options.
Thanks,
Don
-
Hi Don,
Thank you so much for your well detailed answer, really appreciate that.
My question was a little different here. Yes, we're planning to have unique description for the products and recommended products etc. to make the overall content unique. My question was about a specific section on the page where we're planning to show the brand description, which would be exactly same for all the products of a specific brand.
So, how does google (and other bots) consider duplicate content for a specific section, and not the entire page?
-
Hi Nitin,
This is a common issue among Ecommerce sites. The solution is to be creative! I gave an example of how I would go about it, a month ago over on this question. But I also like to analyze how other successful sites overcame the problem.
Take a very similar product like a portable CD player and then head over to Amazon and see how the differentiate them.
Coby Portable CD Player
Memorex Portable CD PlayerFor all intents and purposes these 2 cd players are pretty much the same, about the same price, includes the same items, and performs the same functions. But each page is unique. Amazon has achieved this by including, what others bought, a small product description, manufacturer description, product shipping details, technical details, questions and answers, similar products, and customer reviews. Many of those features are important for buyers but also lend their selves to self generating content.
I know right out of the gate it maybe difficult to put that much attention to a very inexpensive item, but the key here is to spend the time on the backend creating the features that will have a long term reward. You may not be able to go full Amazon compete mode right away, but taking some steps towards that end will have long term rewards.
When I was dealing with this same issue on our eCommerce site trying to differentiate a Nitrile Size 001 oring and a Neoprene Size 001 oring from each other, I spent about a month and half developing content blocks for material, size, primary uses, material qualities, and measurement cross references. Since then the only thing I have had to do is update prices with the market.
I hope this makes sense and helps,
Don
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
-
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
Multiple product hierarchies (creation of refurbished products section) - best solution?
Hi all, I'm in discussion with a client who wishes to introduce a 'refurbished' products section to their website. This section will effectively replicate the structure of the 'brand new' products section. Unusually the key difference will be the fact that the 'refurbished' products section will feature significantly more products than the 'brand new' section, in the region of four times as many. As a guide the website currently stocks approximately 200 products across 8 core product areas. We have recommended that the two sections should be combined in order to prevent the creation of two separate product hierarchies. With 'brand new' / 'refurbished' products segmented via filter functionality. However the client is set on having two separate product hierarchies, i.e. a 'refurbished' section within a completely separate directory. Just wanted to crowd source opinion, in additionally to gaining insight if anyone has experience of a similar request. What solution did you implement? My feeling is that there is a high likelihood over time of the 'refurbished' section growing in authority and starting to outrank the 'brand new' products section. Not to mention a key missed opportunity to group and build authority / content within one product hierarchy. All thoughts and opinions much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 26ryan0 -
What to do about similar product pages on major retail site
Hi all, I have a dilemma and I'm hoping the community can guide me in the right direction. We're working with a major retailer on launching a local deals section of their website (what I'll call the "local site"). The company has 55 million products for one brand, and 37 million for another. The main site (I'll call it the ".com version") is fairly well SEO'd with flat architecture, clean URLs, microdata, canonical tag, good product descriptions, etc. If you were looking for a refrigerator, you would use the faceted navigation and go from department > category > sub-category > product detail page. The local site's purpose is to "localize" all of the store inventory and have weekly offers and pricing specials. We will use a similar architecture as .com, except it will be under a /local/city-state/... sub-folder. Ideally, if you're looking for a refrigerator in San Antonio, Texas, then the local page should prove to be more relevant than the .com generic refrigerator pages. (the local pages have the addresses of all local stores in the footer and use the location microdata as well - the difference will be the prices.) MY QUESTION IS THIS: If we pull the exact same product pages/descriptions from the .com database for use in the local site, are we creating a duplicate content problem that will hurt the rest of the site? I don't think I can canonicalize to the .com generic product page - I actually want those local pages to show up at the top. Obviously, we don't want to copy product descriptions across root domains, but how is it handled across the SAME root domain? Ideally, it would be great if we had a listing from both the .com and the /local pages in the SERPs. What do you all think? Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKelly0 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Content per page?
We used to have an articles worth of content in a scroll box created by our previous SEO, the problem was that it was very much keyword stuffed, link stuffed and complete crap. We then removed this and added more content above the fold, the problem I have is that we are only able to add 150 - 250 words above the fold and a bit of that is repetition across the pages. Would we benefit from putting an article at the bottom of each of our product pages, and when I say article I mean high quality in depth content that will go into a lot more detail about the product, history and more. Would this help our SEO (give the page more uniqueness and authority rather than 200 - 250 word pages). If I could see one problem it would be would an articles worth of content be ok at the bottom of the page and at that in a div tab or scroll box.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0 -
Why does google not show my ecommerce category page when I have the same keywords for many products in the product title?
I have found that google removes the google serach listing of a category from my site (ecommerce) when products within the category have the same key words. I sell golf shirts and have a category called "Mens Golf Shirts" Within the category I have added many products but when the too many of the products say mens golf shirt my link on google gets removed. Before i had products named: FUNKTION Mens Short Sleeve Golf Shirt Red / Black but now I have had to change it to: FUNKTION Red / Black I can understand that they may see this a keyword stuffing but how do I get around this to ensure that each product can rank on google for mens golf shirt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | funktiongolf0 -
Which page to target? Home or /landing-page
I have optimized my home page for the keyword "computer repairs" would I be better of targeting my links at this page or an additional page (which already exists) called /repairs it's possible to rename & 301 this page to /computer-repairs The only advantage I can see from targeting /computer-repairs is that the keywords are in the target URL.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0