How unique do product descriptions need to be?
-
I'm rewriting approximately 10,000 product descriptions, but for feasability it's useful to sometimes reuse some of the phrases that are there (and on other websites as they come straight from the manufacturer -eg. key features), how unique does the content have to be - are we talking 100%, 75%, 50% for it to be effective in google?
Same question goes for the product title!
Many thanks.
-
Hi Chris
Great insight, and you've confirmed some of my initial thoughts and feelings on the matter. I don't want to rewrite purely for google's sake (although that was the tone of the question due to this being an SEO website!). Many of the descriptions we have (from the feed) are rather poorly written, or block text which is hard to scan and read as a customer. I want to make that clearer.
I'm glad you've confirmed that picking a handful of products and doing those really well is a good idea... we're on the case!
As for user generated content, yup, we're asking for reviews but probably need to encourage more in-depth ones.
Thanks for taking the time to answer, it's much appreciated.
-
Hi Panu
Great response, thanks for taking the time to answer. It's not just about google (although we were hit by the panda update big time due to selling similar products to other websites using the same feed of descriptions - mainly manufacturer driven). The benefit of rewriting was two-fold;
1. Making the descriptions clearer and easier to read for our customers.
2. Providing unique & better content to differentiate ourselves in both the customer's eyes and therefore hopefully google's.
We're writing some great and indepth guides (1-2k words) in our blog, and have a very strong customer service ethos. However, in order to stay competitive we need a presence in google obviously, and at the moment there is little or none.
It's really tricky to know what to focus on. We are writing some really great and in-depth descriptions that our customers do love for some key products which are also highly competitive but don't feel that'll be enough... maybe time will tell!
50% is a good starting point, thank you.
Ewan
-
The best thing you can possibly do for getting more unique content is to encourage user-generated content which is typically in the form of reviews, but can be anything (photos, video reviews, FAQ's, etc).
Product descriptions are inherently and necessarily non-unique. I really believe that simply spinning phrases or rewriting a paragraph here and there is a low value activity. A much more sustainable activity is to pick a handful of interesting, current, high margin products and create the absolute best page about them on the web. A personal story, a groupon-style humorous reference, some unique research... whatever, and just dominate that product with content. You'll rank for that and also probably earn some love from customers for being so cool. Keep doing that one by one and carve out a niche. I bet if you do that 10 times really well you'll get a much better ROI for your time and/or cash than 10,000 pages of slightly varied copy.
Unique content only goes so far. A strong domain with piflered copy will outrank others with the same content all day long. They sometimes even beat sites with totally unique content. As unfair as this is, building domain authority takes of time and investment, and is rewarded with traffic for having trusted content.
Finally, my dablings in the dark side have taught me that Google is getting much smarter about spun content, aka content that is thinly unique. 30-40% unique is definitely not unique enough. Varying synonyms is not enough. Significantly unique content varies in theme, length, and style - all of which are algorithmically detectible. Hope that helps.
-
That really depends on how much authority your website has. I have noticed that websites with a lot of authority can stand to have a lot less unique content than new websites with few incoming links. However, since you are not scraping content from another website, I think it's safe to say that having product descriptions that are just about 50% unique should be fine just as long as you have unique titles, headings and some useful unique content.
Then again, since the Panda update has made it significantly more difficult to rank with thousands of pages of feeble content, I wonder how much effort should be placed into these product descriptions. Are they something that searchers will love to see in the SERPs? Is it really necessary to rank with all of these product pages or should you perhaps consider doing a few (say a hundred) high quality landing pages which link these product pages?
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
-
Should I include my company entity in meta description? (for ex. LLC. Inc.)
I'm re-writing my meta descriptions. I'm wondering if I should include the My Company, LLC. in the description or just My Company. Taking out the entity would save about 4 characters.
On-Page Optimization | | IcarusSEO1 -
Duplicate URL errors when URL's are unique
Hi All, I'm running through MOZ analytics site crawl report and it is showing numerous duplicate URL errors, but the URLs appear to be unique. I see that the majority of the URL's are the same, but shouldn't the different brands make them unique to one another? http://www.sierratradingpost.com/clearance~1/clothing~d~5/tech-couture~b~33328/ http://www.sierratradingpost.com/clearance~1/clothing~d~5/zobha~b~3072/ Any ideas as to why these would be shown as duplicate URL errors?
On-Page Optimization | | STP_SEO0 -
Duplicate products - is this fix acceptable?
Hey Mozzers, Questions around this have been asked time and time again. But i have a specific example I would like some advice on. I have 2 products, Product 1: https://goo.gl/Gzo1WC
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
Product 2: https://goo.gl/VbrHQJ As you can see, the products are almost identical bar some technical specifications. The owner of the business wants them listing as 2 products, combining them into a single listing with configurable options is not an option. As such I have simply made one a canonical of the other. Whilst not ideal this seems to be the best "SEO" fix. Option 2: My second option is to rewrite the descriptions to they are different - not too hard on this product and a future options when i have more time, however.... I am presented with a similar problem for another product where there are 23 versions of the same product, i cannot rewrite the same info this many times. They are different sizes, ranges, capacities, resolutions and accuracies and must be listed separately but contain all the same features and basic product information. The basic info is too important not to talk about, and talking about all the technical specs would be too much and teaching the customers likely to buy them to suck eggs. As such I have taken the 23 products and broken them down into 5 similar groups of 2 to 6 products. I have then picked 1 product from each group and written a unique description and changed all similar products in its group to match choosing 1product in each group as the canonical for all the others. So 23 same products become 5 unique products with 18 duplicated products pointing to them as canonicals. Any product pointing to another only differs in technical info, 95% of the page is the same. Whilst obviously not ideal, Is this an acceptable use of canonicals?0 -
Unique Pages with Thin Content vs. One Page with Lots of Content
Is there anyone who can give me a definitive answer on which of the following situations is preferable from an SEO standpoint for the services section of a website? 1. Many unique and targeted service pages with the primary keyword in the URL, Title tag and H1 - but with the tradeoff of having thin content on the page (i.e. 100 words of content or less). 2. One large service page listing all services in the content. Primary keyword for URL, title tag and H1 would be something like "(company name) services" and each service would be in the H2 title. In this case, there is lots of content on the page. Yes, the ideal situation would be to beef up content for each unique pages, but we have found that this isn't always an option based on the amount of time a client has dedicated to a project.
On-Page Optimization | | RCDesign741 -
How many product subcategories are ok?
Let's say I have a sea glass ankle bracelet. On my site, my main keyword is "Sea Glass Jewelry" and have ranked relatively well for this, but this main page has over 200 products in it. I thought that if the URL has the keywords in it, it would be beneficial. I also have a section for all my bracelets, so it would be there and then, a more specific ankle bracelets category. So, technically, an ankle bracelet will show up 3x. Sea Glass Jewelry (all products go here) Bracelets (all bracelets go here) Ankle Bracelets (only ankle bracelets) The URL is only attached to the main category so to speak. If you click the ankle bracelets category, the url will still revert back to the original main category: seaglassjewelry/sterlinganklebracelet so I don't believe there is duplicate content. I have had my domain for years and it has ranked well until someone hacked into my site 2 years back. I have never been able to recover from this loss. Since then, I have tried to optimize my site, but nothing seems to be working and I just want to make sure that I am not hurting my ranking by doing this. Can someone confirm this is the best way to do it or make a suggestion? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
How do I manage my organic SEO efforts with multiple product descriptions/specifications???
Good Evening MOZ community I am currently working on a website my company has just launched. I am in charge of the entire commercial side of the business from pricing to brand management including all elements of digital marketing. First of all I should make it clear I am by no means an SEO expert. However I appreciate the importance of organic search and particularly on page optimization and no I need to build it into our site from the onset. My problem lies in that our website stocks roughly 2000 individual products (Tools and Engineering products) and I am struggling to overcome the following; 1. I do not have the time or resource to re-write original product descriptions and specifications for 2000+ products 2. How can I create healthy on page SEO without having to do this? (we are not able to provide budget to outsource these efforts at the moment) Will copying manufacturer descriptions cripple our SEO 3. Many product specifications need to be displayed exactly as they would on the original manufacturer websites. How can I include exact copies of these without being penalized by google for duplicating content? Essentially I realise the importance of on page SEO and want to build it into the site for the future but need to find a way of optimizing it with minimal time. I understand much of this is a big ask but any hints or tips you may have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Rob 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | robmarr7890 -
How to: Meta description for home page
My latest crawl diagnostic is telling me that my homepage is missing a meta description. I am using wordpress and thesis. How do I add a meta description to my main page? ex www.mynewsite.com Mahalo!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Meta Description Tags and Rankings
Hi there, I have a lot of pages set up on my site but most have no content. If I add the correct meta description tags to those pages, will that help rank for the root domain? I am slowly getting the content added for each page but wanted to see if I could boost rankings in the meantime. http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Example: most of pages under "Services" are blank. Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | PMC-3120870