How do you avoid duplicate content when you sell products that are produced by other manufacturers?
-
I have a packaging product site, and they sell products from various manufacturers. What can we do with the product detail pages? As of now, the client has copy pasted content straight from the "About" sections on the manufacturers' sites. Obviously, those manufacturers want my client to sell their products, and the products need to be described. How much of a no-no is this copy pasting, and how can I fix it?
-
Copy and pasted what, exactly? If it's specifications, that's perfectly fine. If you are really worried about it (I would not be, I have clients that post specifications like this), you could always include the specifications in a PDF and offer a link to that. That's less helpful to visitors though, and they are really who you should be targeting first.
If it's a product description, then yes, that's definitely no good. Write your own description. Include a staff review. This paired with the ability for users to review/comment on the product will give you enough unique content to shine.
Look at big e-retailers if you want to see how others are doing content. Cabelas has a Q & A section, for example. Show widgets like Amazon does ('Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..) and provide short descriptions for each product tile.
Include video content if you can, or relevant how-tos. MidwayUSA does a good job of having supporting content.
Use microtags for everything you possibly can.
That should be enough work to last you a year! Cheers.
-
[This response edited by SEOmoz staff. This answer is a copy of http://www.ecreativeim.com/blog/2011/03/google-panda-change-seo-impact-on-ecommerce-sites/ and the answer below has been truncated to respect the copyright of the original author]
Google Panda algorithm change could have consequences for many smaller eCommerce sites — or even large ones that haven’t been putting in their SEO time. Unfortunately, far too many eCommerce sites run afoul of things that Google considers low-quality content, especially eCommerce sites with a very large number of products.
-
There is only one solution. Write original content.
One easy way to do this is
-
read the manufacturers product description.
-
set it aside.
-
write you new description using your words
-
compare the two descriptions; make sure you have used the same sentences and make sure you have covered all the important facts.
-
(Bonus time) provide additional useful information that the manufacturer didn't.
-
-
I'm in a very similar position at my company. Duplicate content is going to hurt your SERP rankings, period. You need to write your own product descriptions. Even a really short original description is better than something copied directly from the manufacturer.
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
-
Combining products - edit existing product page or 301 redirect to new page?
We want to combine existing products - e.g. 'hand lotion' and 'body lotion' will become 'hand & body lotion'. As such, we'll need to combine the two product pages into one. What would be the best route to take in terms of SEO to do this? My initial reaction is to create a new product page and then 301 or 302 redirect the old products to the new product page depending on if the change is permanent or temporary. Would you agree? Or am I missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | SwankyApple1 -
How do you make product pages unique when there are thousands of products?
When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each? Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail? Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing... Notes: Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page. There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.
On-Page Optimization | | Ria_3 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I am new to the MOZ Pro community. I got the below message for many of my pages. We have a video site so all content in the page except the video link would be different. How can i handle such pages. Can we place adsense AD's on these pages? Duplicate Page Content Code and content on this page looks similar or identical to code and content on other pages on your site. Search engines may not know which pages are best to include in their index and rankings. Common fixes for this issue include 301 redirects, using the rel=canonical tag, and using the Parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Central. For more information on duplicate content, visit http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. Please help me to know how to handle this.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Nettv0 -
Title Tag duplication.
Hi Guys/Gals, We do a lot of work in a very competitive space (personal injury) and are having an internal debate on the best way to implement title tags for new sites. We understand that keywords, title tags, etc., don't possess the power they once did, but we have yet to see conclusive proof of this in our space. The vast majority of competitors still rank very well for keyword focused content, title tags, etc., while having average link profiles and little content. We write a lot of content for our clients and want to know if someone can offer their opinion on the question that follows this example: "Top 5 Injuries Caused by T-Bone Collisions | Indiana Accident Lawyer" Would it seem repetitive or manipulative to construct title tags as shown, always placing "Indiana Accident Attorney" or "Indianapolis Accident Lawyer," or similar of at the end of each title tag? Thanks, gang!
On-Page Optimization | | Wayne760 -
How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ?
Hello, I wondered if somebody could give me some advice. The problem of various iterations of the clanedar page coming up as duplicate content. There is a large calendar on my site for events and each time the page is viewed it is seen as duplicate content . How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ? Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Tony14Aug0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Duplicate Page Title
Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos
On-Page Optimization | | athosk0 -
What is the best duplicate content checker that will check by phrase?
I create a lot of landing pages for individual keywords on my site. An issue that I've run into is I unknowingly use some common phrases repeatedly on different pages and therefore sometimes get dinged by Google. I'm basically looking for a tool that would check the content of a new page against all the other pages on my site and check it phrase by phrase. Most of the tools I've found make you put in two URLs to check against - I need it to check against hundreds.
On-Page Optimization | | davegr0 -
Content within JavaSccript code
I know that it is not a good practice to inlcude SEO content within JavaScript, but are there exceptions to what Google can spider or is it best to just avoid completely?
On-Page Optimization | | mjmorse0