Taking descriptions from Manufacturer sites and Duplicate content

[seanmccauley]

We are doing some inventory improvements eg new photographs from various angles, etc. We are also writing descriptions for each product.. As one of our suppliers has perfect desriptions on their site what is the theory on how duplicate content will affect our ranking for these products if we copy and paste? Also if we change the descriptions, just how different do they need to be? Thanks

[danatanseo]

Yes it is Sean. However, I thought I saw that SEOMoz included it in a blog post somewhere. Perhaps if you email them they can tell you where? I just tried to find it and the only "Free" one I can seem to find is Wil Reynolds' presentation. I'll look around a little more and if I can find the link I'll send it.

[seanmccauley]

Drat cant watch Fabios video. Is it part of a Moz bundle?

[danatanseo]

You will especially enjoy the way the audience giggleswhen Fabio says "spreadsheet." He was a very engaging speaker with some great ideas!

[seanmccauley]

Dana

Its all coming back to me. My SEO brain is a bit rusty unlike my alter ego who sometimes posts here..

We are lucky on this occasion as the manufacturer site has great B2C descriptions which sell the product well. Also, none of our main competitors are taking the descriptions indeed nor have they taken time to write their own.

Thanks for your answer. I'm off to watch those videos

[danatanseo]

Hi Sean,

This is a pretty common scenario for e-commerce. I am in-house SEO for a large e-commerce site specializing in profession audio video equipment. It's highly competitive and also highly technical. You often see resellers copying and pasting manufacturer descriptions. While it's not optimal, and unique, robust description are obviously better, there are times when just getting a mass number of products up on the website quickly makes it necessary to copy and paste some descriptions. While Google most likely isn't going to penalize you (unless you copy verbatim a manufacturer's page, HTML and all), your content probably will never rank as high as it might with really great, well-written descriptions that speak to your specific audience.

As far as your question concerning re-writing the descriptions, if you simply change some words around or slip in some synonyms instead of doing a complete re-write, I'd consider not doing that. The reason being that you are going to end up with content that is still substantially similar to the original. According to Google's Matt Cutts, content that is "substantially similar" is the same as duplicate content. Here's his interview with Eric Enge regarding that issue: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

IMHO, most manufacturer descriptions are pretty horrible anyway. They aren't written for your customers, they are written for their customers (which in this case is you). Generally those descriptions tend to be highly technical in nature and not compelling from a marketing viewpoint. You'd be far better off writing one by one unique descriptions that really speak to your customer personas. I know on a big site how huge a task that can be. But, even on a large site it can be tackled over several months with some concentrated dedication. Fabio Riccotta gave a great 15-minute presentation on how he accomplished this on a very large e-commerce site over the course of several months: http://www.seomoz.org/videos/e-commerse-seo-tips-and-tricks

All that being said, I can totally relate to the daunting task it is to churn out high-quality and unique product descriptions. It's something we struggle to do every day!  Hope this is helpful

Dana