Another Duplicate Content - eCommerce Question!
-
We are manufacturers of about 15 products and our website provides information about the products. We also offer them for sale on the site. Recently we partnered with a large eCommerce site that sells many of these types of products. They lifted descriptions from our site for theirs and are now selling our products. They have higher DA than us.
Will this cause a ranking problem for us? Should we write unique descriptions for them?
Thanks!
-
I totally agree with Linda. it won't hurt your site or won't penalize. I think the best solution for this is, just simply ask your partner site to change the product description rel= "author" as your site name. It will help the both sites.
-
There is no duplicate content penalty, as such. (Google "duplicate content penalty" for many articles about this.) When Google comes across duplicate content, it simply decides which version should appear in its index and drops the other one(s). This won't affect the high-quality content you have on other parts of your site.
-
Thanks Eric. I am not concerned about the distributor outranking me for the specific product name. Actually I'd prefer they get the sale. I am concerned that Google will in some way "penalize" my site for generic terms related to the category the products are in. The site is intended to be informational / educational and hopefully drive popularity of the products and sales.
And to Anthony's point above, there is additional content on the product pages. Although the reviews are provided by a 3rd party (Shopper Approved) so I don't think they are actually indexed as part of the page. I think it is some JS magic that I don't pretend to understand.
So I guess I am concerned it may look bad overall to Google and they would put us under some sort of Duplicate Content penalty. Is there such a penalty?
Ultimately looks like there's no avoiding writing some fresh copy just to be safe!
-
If the content was on your site to begin with (and was already crawled by Googlebot), then you would get credit for the content. If you're the manufacturer, I would think the eComm site would want to rewrite so they could drive sales and stand out from the crowd a bit. I also know it's a challenge in many cases to rewrite content due to vendor restrictions or staffing constraints.
That being said... Unique is always better because it will help the site rank within the same target market as their competitors, and will differentiate from the competition. I wouldn't worry too much about someone using your descriptions, since you should ultimately get authoring credit for the content (in Google's eyes) if it came from you first. All factors being equal, your site would prevail. It's possible you may be outranked for a product term if the other sites are stronger, but that evidence will come with time.
I would recommend asking the eComm site to rewrite/make the content unique, since that would do better for both parties. You're gambling with the same content on multiple sites, so its possible you could be outranked by a distributor. If you don't have restrictions around the content, I would either update your content or ask them to update theirs. Hopefully Google will see your site (the manufacturer) as a more relevant source, but I've seen some pretty funky things in the past so I wouldn't guarantee it.
-
Yes, this certainly could cause issues with your rankings. If the site is more authoritative than yours it certainly could be an issue. I would most certainly provide unique descriptions for them. Especially since this is a small number of products, not thousands of products. Also, focus on improving your content as well. Is there anything additional you could add to your page that would help the user? Perhaps some fresh user reviews or testimonials?
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
-
Canonical Tags for Legacy Duplicate Content
I've got a lot of duplicate pages, especially products, and some are new but most have been like this for a long time; up to several years. Does it makes sense to use a canonical tag pointing to one master page for each product. Each page is slightly different with a different feature and includes maybe a sentence or two that is unique but everything else is the same.
Technical SEO | | AmberHanson0 -
Duplicate content issue
Moz crawl diagnostic tool is giving me a heap of duplicate content for each event on my website... http://www.ticketarena.co.uk/events/Mint-Festival-7/ http://www.ticketarena.co.uk/events/Mint-Festival-7/index.html Should i use a 301 redirect on the second link? i was unaware that this was classed as duplicate content. I thought it was just the way the CMS system was set up? Can anyone shed any light on this please. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages
Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Duplicate Footer Content
A client I just took over is having some duplicate content issues. At the top of each page he has about 200 words of unique content. Below this is are three big tables of text that talks about his services, history, etc. This table is pulled into the middle of every page using php. So, he has the exact same three big table of text across every page. What should I do to eliminate the dup content. I thought about removing the script then just rewriting the table of text on every page... Is there a better solution? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BigStereo0 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Thin/Duplicate Content
Hi Guys, So here's the deal, my team and I just acquired a new site using some questionable tactics. Only about 5% of the entire site is actually written by humans the rest of the 40k + (and is increasing by 1-2k auto gen pages a day)pages are all autogen + thin content. I'm trying to convince the powers that be that we cannot continue to do this. Now i'm aware of the issue but my question is what is the best way to deal with this. Should I noindex these pages at the directory level? Should I 301 them to the most relevant section where actual valuable content exists. So far it doesn't seem like Google has caught on to this yet and I want to fix the issue while not raising any more red flags in the process. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DPASeo0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001 -
Question about duplicate content within my site
Hi. New here to SEOmoz and also somewhat new to SEO in general. A friend has asked me to help do some onsite SEO for their company's website. The company uses Drupal Content Management System. They have a couple product pages that contain a tabbed section for features, accessories, etc. When they built their tabs, they used a Drupal module called Quicktabs, by which each individual tab is created as a separate page and then pulled into the tabs from those pages. So, in essence, you now have instances of repeated content. 1) the page used to create the tab, and 2) the tab that displays on the product page. My question is, how should I handle the pages that were used to create the tabs? Should I make them NOINDEX? Thank you for your advice in advance.
Technical SEO | | aprilm-1890400