Shall I change duplicated product descriptions if I am top ranking result and was first to publish it?
-
about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites).
The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well.
Which of the following options would you opt for?
- keeping the description and just adding some unique content
- replacing the complete product description by a new one
-
thanks everybody.
excellent advice. I will just limit to make some tests of products for now to see how it will affect ranking. -
This is the best answer. It puts you in a great position as well since it means that a lot of your competitors that are using the same feed will not show up in the SERP's as well. I would expand my monitoring out to more products though and see how you are doing with them.
-
No way - you don't mess around when you are already ranking #1.
Only do that if your rankings tank.
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
-
How does product category description affect SEO?
Hi - we are a website that sells tours. We have category pages that list the tours in that category (by city, by length of time, theme, etc). At the top of each category page, before the buttons linking to the tours, there is a category description. It is a pretty long paragraph. We are redesigning the website and think it would look nicer to show 2-3 lines of text and then have a down arrow and 'read' more so people can click and it would expand to show the full category description if they want to read it and it won't take up so much room that way. My question is - will this affect SEA at all? Or because the text is still there, just hidden, it won't do anything? Our site ranks very high in organic searches on google and we do not want to do anything that will hurt SEO. thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shirapn0 -
Description vs meta description
I have an e-commerce website and am trying to create product category pages. I am under the impression that Description is the text that would appear under the title on a google search and I believe the meta description is just what google reads? Is having BOTH important or just description? Is it ok to duplicate the description for the meta description? I know its not good to duplicate descriptions on other products and pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchachula0 -
Rank Tracker Result Not Reflected In Google
I'm tracking keyword results in Rank Tracker, but I can't confirm the positions when I do a Google search for the tracked keywords. Does anybody know why RT says the site should be #23, but is not actually in Google? Is there a way to check Google results from different data centers? If I recall, Google allowed the option to view results from different cities, though I don't know if they still allow this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Tabs and duplicate content?
We own this site http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ and just a little concerned as I right clicked open in new tab on the tab content section and it went to a new page For example if you right click on the price tab and click open in new tab you will end up with the url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson
http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/#tabThree Does this mean that our content is being duplicated onto another page? If so what should I do?0 -
Rankings Up instantly after publishing new blog article
Hello All, My question is, why did my site rankings go up all of a sudden as soon as I published an article in my blog and it gets indexed (almost immidiately) The rankings increase are the following Keyword 1: from Top 5 to Top 1 Keyword 2: from Top 4 to Top 2 Keyword 3: from Top 16 to Top 3 Keyword 4: from no where to Page 2 (big time keyword) Any ideas or experience on this? When it first happened early this week(i published a new article), my site rankings dropped back after a couple of days. I did the same pattern by pubishing a new article and it went back up again. No personalized result here btw. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onecov0 -
Is my other domain making me not rank?
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back. A few possibilties to why this has happened: We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools. Why I think it could be this: If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version. Here is the webpages in question: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/ http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/ Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities. Hope someone can help me out with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Product Vartiations
I was having a discussion with someone (who doesn't work in SEO) today and they asked the question why don't you have seperate pages for product sizes? I answered with the line "it would make the site huge" but I have been giving it some thought and I was wondering what others think. The scenario is that you have a polo shirt in black, white and blue and in sizes small, medium and large which gives 9 variations (small black, medium black etc). Currently we have one page for each product with the variations available for selection. Would keeping the current system and having links to a seperate pages be a good or bad thing? So in the above example we would have the main page and then links to each of the variation pages. So what do you think - good or bad? Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve250 -
Duplicate Content issue on pages with Authority and decent SERP results
Hi, I'm not sure what the best thing to do here is. I've got quite a few duplicate page errors in my campaign. I must admit the pages were originally built just to rank a keyword variation. e.g. Main page keyword is [Widget in City] the "duplicate" page is [Black Widget in City] I guess the normal route to deal with duplicate pages is to add a canonical tag and do a 304 redirect yea? Well these pages have some page Authority and are ranking quite well for their exact keywords, what do I do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpecialCase0