Duplicate content on ecommerce

[BestMedical]

We have a website that we created a little over a year ago and have included our core products we have always focused on such as mobility scooters and power wheelchairs. We have been going through and updating product descriptions, adding product reviews that our customers have provided etc in order to improve on our SEO rankings and not be penalized by the Panda update. We were approached by a manufacturer last year about their products and they had close to 10k products that we were able to upload easily into our system. Obviously these all have standard manufacturers descriptions many sites are also using. It will take us forever to go through and change all of these and many products are similar to each other anyway they just vary in size, color etc. Will it help our rankings for our core products to simply go through and delete all of these additional products and categories and just add them one by one with unique descriptions and more detailed information when we have time? We aren't really selling many of them anyway so it won't hurt our sales. I'm clearly new to SEO and any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

My main website is www.bestmedicalsuppliesonsale dot com

A sample core category that we have changed descriptions for is http://www.bestmedicalsuppliesonsale.com/mobility-scooters-s/36.htm

A sample of a category and products we simply uploaded would be at http://www.bestmedicalsuppliesonsale.com/Wound-Care-s/4837.htm

I'm open to all suggestions I would just like to see my traffic and obviously sales increase. If there are any other glaring problems please let me know. I need help!

[BestMedical]

Hi Dana,

Thank you so much for the detailed response. I'm new to SEOMOZ and am hoping this can help me get some answers being new to SEO.

I'll go ahead and leave the products up there and focus on trying to tackle all of those descriptions piece by piece. I just want to make sure they aren't hurting my other categories that are my actual focus and I have created unique descriptions. I don't want to lose sales on those items because I have a bunch of stuff up I never really sell.

Thank you

[danatanseo]

Hi Steve,

I am an in-house SEO for an e-commerce company that deals with many of the same issues. Although our products are entirely different from yours, we too struggle with the large number of products we need to get online, the fact that everyone is using manufacturer's descriptions and the duplicate content problems that creates.

From experience, my advice would be to get the products up on your site. If you can at least create unique titles and meta descriptions, that would be great. Then, tackle the content over time. Google likes seeing pages maintained and updated. If you've already uploaded the products, it actually might hurt you now to take them all down, and start over uploading them once you have content.

Google also understands the difference between an e-commerce site and a blog. The content and purpose of content for these two different types of sites is quite different.

We have some products that it's just silly to spend a lot of time and effort optimizing for amazing unique content. How flowery can you really get about a CAT5 cable? It is what it is. Still they need to be on the site because if they aren't, we can't sell them.

I'd say leave the products there and develop a game plan to develop unique content for them over time. Fabio Ricotta gave a great presentation at MozCon 2012 about how he achieved this with an e-commerce site in Brazil. I highly recommend his 15-minute presentation. There are a lot of great ideas packed in there. Ideas that are great if you have limited resources.

Hope this helps!

Dana