Mass uploading low quality product pages

[BeckyKey]

Hi Mozzers!

I have a question on mass uploading low quality product pages

We have a huge catalogue of products and our product managers are looking to mass reference 17,000 new products quickly on the website.

Obviously, this will mean content will somehow have to be made unique - which would take a huge amount of resource.

Apart from this issue, will adding this many new product pages in one go be bad for SEO?

If we also do manage to make the content unique, but not high quality - we'll have 17,000 new low quality product pages - will this reduce our domain authority?

Becky

[BeckyKey]

Thank you for your replies.

I don't think the content will be exact duplicates, however I haven't seen it yet.

My concern is that it will be low quality, product page content, put up quickly (so could be duplicate with supplier sites) because no one can write 17,000 that quickly.

Will so much low quality content affect us?

[becole]

Becky, if you are aware that you have a lot of content that's going to be duplicate, then you've already identified the first step--which is to recognize that they are duplicates. Too many people just upload those pages and don't realize that they're duplicates and then wonder, after the fact, why their site's traffic went down. So for that, I commend you.

In order to deal with this, though, you need to determine which pages are truly going to be duplicates of other pages. Once you've done that, then you should use the canonical tag. The canonical tag should be placed on the duplicate pages and point back to the main page (or the one you don't want to be marked as duplicate).

Come up with a strategic, realistic plan for making those pages unique by adding or rewriting the content. And you might want to look at information such as your site's analytics or make a list of your best-selling products and deal with those first.

Adding a noindex tag to pages and removing them from the index really shouldn't be an option, because you DO want those pages indexed--adding content to them will make them unique and you'll be able to remove the canonical tag. Once you mark a page and tell the search engines not to index that page, it's much tougher to get it BACK in the index, so I wouldn't do that.

[EGOL]

If I had 17,000 new product pages and the content was excellent I would upload them and link them into the website as fast as possible.  They I would be excited about getting more sales.

If the content is thin, has a cookie-cutter format, or if the product descriptions are duplicated from a feed or found elsewhere on the web I would be scared about getting a Panda problem.   So, I would write new, unique and substantive descriptions before they are uploaded.

I would view 17000 new product pages as an important opportunity and get them written promptly without sacrificing quality.

As a last alternative, I would use skinny content, but noindex these new pages and remove the noindex as the content is upgraded.