Ecommerce good/bad? Showing product description on sub/category page?

[longdenc_gmail.com]

Hi Mozers,

I have a  ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website.

If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right?

OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page.

I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt.

Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet.

Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts:

http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/

Chris

27eVz

[longdenc_gmail.com]

thank you everyone who contributed to this response, I found it very helpful. I will adjust my pages this morning, incase anyone checks back. If I see any dramatic SEO changes I will let you know.

Also this is my first time posting on SEOMOZ, loved it! What a cool feature.

[MagicDude4Eva]

Have a look at this Q&A which touches on similar points: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-copy-should-there-be-on-a-category-page

I would get rid of the product descriptions on category pages - I think it is more an user-experience issues and I do think that having so much copy on the category pages it will weaken your category pages.

[CMC-SD]

The category pages definitely don't look clean and professional right now, and that will impact conversion rate. You have enough copy on the category pages to establish relevancy, so I would be extremely surprised if your rankings went down after you stopped showing the product descriptions on the category pages.

If you're hesitant, would it be possible to test it both ways? Choose a couple of categories and pull the product descriptions off them. See what happens to their rankings and traffic.

[matbennett]

I've only looked at a handful of pages / categories, but I am not sure that you are doing yourself too many favours.

In SEO terms I think that you are undermining your unique content pages.  By repeating the unique content from the product pages on to the category pages you are effectively introducing duplicates.  Yes, it is your own content, but spreading it across those pages is unlikely to do you many favours.

More importantly it's also pretty confusing in places.  Some of those categories are quite off putting.

What would I do?

1. Remove those descriptions from the cat pages
2. Add category descriptions
3. Try to flesh out the product descriptions with more unique content and keep an eye out for those that duplicate each other.

I hope that helps.