Duplicate product content - from a manufacturer website, to retailers

[A_Q]

Hi Mozzers,

We're working on a website for a manufacturer who allows retailers to reuse their product information. Now, this of course raises the issue of duplicate content. The manufacturer is the content owner and originator, but retailers will copy the information for their own site and not link back (permitted by the manufacturer) - the only reference to the manufacturer will be the brand name citation on the retailer website.

How would you deal with the duplicate content issues that this may cause. Especially considering the domain authority for a lot of the retailer websites is better than the manufacturer site?

Thanks!!

[MattAntonino]

This is one of the biggest issues I see with ecommerce sites these days. Automatic feeds of data, titles, descriptions, product info, etc. right into the store. It never ranks all that well without massive authority.

To be honest, the more you can change pre-import the better. Add something to the titles, change them up manually with an intern - whatever it takes to create unique value. For a while I was outranking Polyvore, David Jones & Amazon for the word "skirt" just because my product and category descriptions were massively different than anything on Google at the time (longer, more detailed, more useful.)

In this type of situation, don't be afraid to experiment. You're not going to outrank eBay, Amazon or the OEM for most products individually but if you try mixing things up you may find weaknesses that are easy enough to exploit. Whenever I imported, I'd alter the CSV files directly and then import. Made life so much better (and drastically improves rankings on long tail searches.)

(A small, small e-tailer won't do this but a mid size to large one always should be.)