How to handle brand description on product pages?
-
Hi Mozzers,
Hope you're doing good. I have a content placement related question.
Assume, I have 1000 products of brand A, 1000 of brand B, and so on. Now, if I want to put brand specific 200-words description on each of these product pages. I'm creating duplicate content across the site by putting absolutely same brand description on these product pages i.e brand A description on first 1000 pages, brand B description on next 1000 products and so on.
Looking for an expert advice around placement of content here i.e how can I add brand description on product pages and avoid duplicate content penalty? Any help?
-
Sure. Thank you so much for confirming the same.
For the first time today, my recommended solution for a problem was supported by you. I'm really happy about it. "Moving in the right direction" feeling
-
If they insist on having brand information, then yes, the alternative is to have a small portion of brand information, with a link to the full brand text on its own page.
-
Hi Sir Alan,
Thank you so much for your response. I agree, actually I also recommended the same solution of creating new brand pages and then linking them from the product pages but they (product team) wants to show brand description on product pages itself.
Could you please recommend any other solution here? If there can be another way to implement this. Or else, we might show a few words of description there along with a link to brand page.
-
Nitin
200 words - what is the point / value of having that repeated on thousands of pages? It's not unique, and regardless of what some people think about it being okay because "lots of sites do it" or because "Major brand that's able to get away with lots of bad SEO because they own a market" can do it.
If there are two hundred words based on non-product specific information, this is not a best practice. Instead, that information should be contained on just one page, and if you believe, from a user experience perspective, providing a link to that from each product page is helpful, that's what I recommend.
-
Thanks Don. I meant this only.
-
HI Nitin,
Doing a follow up here. So you are worried about a particular section of a page is going to be considered duplicate? If so, then that is of no worry, it is normal for many pages to have the same information when it pertains to the overall intent of the page. What is looked at is the page in whole not a section of it.
If that is not what you mean please give me an example so I can help identify options.
Thanks,
Don
-
Hi Don,
Thank you so much for your well detailed answer, really appreciate that.
My question was a little different here. Yes, we're planning to have unique description for the products and recommended products etc. to make the overall content unique. My question was about a specific section on the page where we're planning to show the brand description, which would be exactly same for all the products of a specific brand.
So, how does google (and other bots) consider duplicate content for a specific section, and not the entire page?
-
Hi Nitin,
This is a common issue among Ecommerce sites. The solution is to be creative! I gave an example of how I would go about it, a month ago over on this question. But I also like to analyze how other successful sites overcame the problem.
Take a very similar product like a portable CD player and then head over to Amazon and see how the differentiate them.
Coby Portable CD Player
Memorex Portable CD PlayerFor all intents and purposes these 2 cd players are pretty much the same, about the same price, includes the same items, and performs the same functions. But each page is unique. Amazon has achieved this by including, what others bought, a small product description, manufacturer description, product shipping details, technical details, questions and answers, similar products, and customer reviews. Many of those features are important for buyers but also lend their selves to self generating content.
I know right out of the gate it maybe difficult to put that much attention to a very inexpensive item, but the key here is to spend the time on the backend creating the features that will have a long term reward. You may not be able to go full Amazon compete mode right away, but taking some steps towards that end will have long term rewards.
When I was dealing with this same issue on our eCommerce site trying to differentiate a Nitrile Size 001 oring and a Neoprene Size 001 oring from each other, I spent about a month and half developing content blocks for material, size, primary uses, material qualities, and measurement cross references. Since then the only thing I have had to do is update prices with the market.
I hope this makes sense and helps,
Don
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
-
Should I even do product page schema?
If I have no reviews/ratings on the page itself and special/limited time offers and just a regular product page with a standard price, is there any ability to do product schema with it getting flagged for errors? Google's Structured Markup Testing Tool threw me an error when I test it without any of those: | One of offers or review or aggregateRating should be provided. | And even if it's possible, is there any point?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchStan0 -
How do we avoid duplicate/thin content on +150,000 product pages?
Hey guys! We got a rather large product range (books) on our eCommerce site (+150,000 titles). We get book descriptions as meta data from our publishers, which we display on the product pages. This obviously is not unique, as many other sites display the same piece of description of the book. It is important for us to rank on those book titles, so my question to You is: How would you go about it? I mean, it seems like a rather unrealistic task to paraphrase +150,000 (and growing) book descriptions. As I see it, there are these options: 1. Don't display the descriptions on the product pages (however then those pages will get even thinner!)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacob_Holm
2. Display the (duplicate) descriptions, but put no-index on those product pages in order not to punish the rest of the site (not really an option, though).
3. Hire student workers to produce unique product descriptions for all 150,000 products (seems like a huge and expensive task) But how would You solve such a challenge?
Thanks a lot! Cheers, Tommy.0 -
What is the impact of an off-topic page to other pages on the site?
We are working with a client who has one irrelevant, off-topic post ranking incredibly well and driving a lot of traffic. However, none of the other pages on the site, that are relevant to this client's business, are ranking. Links are good and in-line with competitors for the various terms. Oddly, very few external links reference this off-topic post, most are to the home page. Local profile is also in-line with competitors, including reviews, categorization, geo-targeting, pictures, etc. No spam issues exist and no warnings in Google Search Console. The only thing that seems weird is this off-topic post but that could affect rankings on other pages of the site? Would removing that off-topic post potentially help increase traffic and rankings for the other more relevant pages of the site? Appreciate any and all help or ideas of where to go from here. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Using the same picture, but 2 differents pages and Alt descriptions
Hi Moz experts, I have a quick technical question for you. If we would like to use the same picture on the website, but using differ Alt description and also, be sure to customize it to make sure, it will not look like the other. This strategy is for saving cost on new picture. Do you think google will see this as iidentical content ? Thank you for your hands up on this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johncurlee0 -
How to handle individual page redirects on Wix?
I switched from one domain to another because I wanted a domain that had our company name so it was more brand-y. However, the old domain had better DA/PA. Originally I set up a global 301 from the old to the new, but now I'm finding that I actually need to set up individual 301's from each URL of the old site, or at least from each page. However, I am using Wix so it looks like I can't always do URL-URL 301's, although I can redirect any URL to a page on the new website. The problem is that, in some cases, the content on the new site is different (or, for example, I can only link a particular blog post on the old site back to the new site's blog's main page). How closely do URLS/pages need to resemble each other for link juice to be transferred? Also, should I try to set up all these redirects manually or bite the bullet and go back to using the old domain? The problem is that I did a lot of beginner SEO junk for the new domain, like submitting to a few higher-quality directories, and getting our website on various industry resource sites, etc. I'd need to re-do this entirely if I go back to the old page. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BohmKalish1230 -
Page title inconsistency
Hi folks, Our agency rebranded from New Brand Vision to Decibel Digital a few weeks ago. Most things seem to be fine, 301 redirected the site and our site looks much better however there is one issue. When searching for our responsive site using my Iphone5, the page title appears as "New Brand Vision", even though "New Brand Vision" isn't within the source code. Our page title is <title></span><span data-mce-mark="1">Creative Digital Agency in London | Decibel Digital </span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> which is picked up on Desktop, but not through mobile search when sourcing our responsive site. Does anyone have any suggestions? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tangent0 -
Keywords under product listing pages
Hi guys, One of my main concerns when we start redesigning the site Trespass.co.uk, is the current pages like this one http://www.trespass.co.uk/snow-sports/clothing/ski-jackets/womens-ski-jackets are bordering over optimisation. Is this the case as each product listed in the url above has "womens ski jacket" under each product. If we have 50 products on each product listing page with the product name + type of product, ie. flora womens ski jacket, xyz mens waterproof jacket. Are we over optimising the page for the main keywords by having them under each product? Would that page be over optimised for womens ski jackets? Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trespass0 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0