How bad is duplicate content for ecommerce sites?

[ArtisanCrafted]

We have multiple eCommerce sites which not only share products across domains but also across categories within a single domain.

Examples:

http://www.artisancraftedhome.com/sinks-tubs/kitchen-sinks/two-tone-sinks/medium-rounded-front-farmhouse-sink-two-tone-scroll

http://www.coppersinksonline.com/copper-kitchen-and-farmhouse-sinks/two-tone-kitchen-farmhouse-sinks/medium-rounded-front-farmhouse-sink-two-tone-scroll

http://www.coppersinksonline.com/copper-sinks-on-sale/medium-rounded-front-farmhouse-sink-two-tone-scroll

We have selected canonical links for each domain but I need to know if this practice is having a negative impact on my SEO.

[BradsDeals]

If you're canonicalizing duplicate pages to a single source, assuming it's the one you want to promote, then no, it shouldn't hurt your SEO. The site you're pointing at should see some benefit, and the ones doing the pointing will take a backseat, possibly drop a bit. I'm guessing that's the whole idea?

But why do you have multiple sites that have the same products and descriptions if you're not trying to drive organic traffic to all of them? Is it more for paid landing page purposes? If not, why not 301 them to the main site instead? Or, as EGOL suggested, build out content that makes each site uniquely helpful and authoritative so that those canonicals aren't necessary?

[GlobeRunner]

Artisancrafted, as long as you are using the canonical tag properly on the sites, it shouldn't be hurting your site's SEO at all. However, if you are able to move towards having unique product descriptions on each site then that will benefit your SEO in the long run.

[RobCairns]

Hello,

This is kind of an indirect answer, but basically Google accepts that there are going to be duplicates when it comes to products on the market with multiple providers. The way they have structured this is that duplicate content in this capacity is not going to hurt you, but creating original content for products and categories will help you.

A big point is to work towards the knowledge graph and "being the answer". You want to get away from simply describing the product and get into describing who would benefit most from it, what kinds of detailing are best suited to it, which color tones work well with it and so on. In this case, if you wanted a new sink in your house, what questions would you be asking?

If you can answer those questions, there are good odds that the combination of original content and directing content to user queries will give you a boost rather than forcing you to worry about taking a penalty.

Fire any follow-up questions you have my way if you like - always happy to help!

Cheers,

Rob

[EGOL]

I know that this is not the type of response that you were looking for.... but I think that you have a tremendous opportunity.   You already have multiple sites up and running.  Now for the small cost of improving their content you will improve the performance of your entire business and the diversified product descriptions (and diverse title tags) will bring in more traffic from the long tail searches.

By mathematics the increased number of sales will be an awesome contribution to your profits, because you will gain economy of scale.  You might even be able to hire a person to write new and better descriptions and the lift in your sales will fund their salary.