How do we avoid duplicate/thin content on +150,000 product pages?

[Jacob_Holm]

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!)
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.

[EGOL]

I would publish unique descriptions.  The advantage of unique descriptions is that you are not one of many with the same content in the SERPs.  Your pages will have more unique keywords for long tail reach beyond your competitors, and your pages will not be filtered from the SERPs because you arrived late with a weak site displaying the exact same content as others.  You are entering a competitive environment.  Compete or die.

I wouldn't hire students.  I would hire a couple people who have university degrees in English with an emphasis in literature and who have earned excellent grades.  These are folks who know books, have bought lots of them, are familiar with their commercial descriptions and can write freely and easily with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.  The competing salaries are not as high as other employees.  They will cost more than a rocks-for-jocks sophomore who is about to drop out, but they are definitely worth the extra money for the quality and productivity that comes with them.

I would tell them to start by picking books that they are already familiar with and write some sample descriptions.  Before they start writing I would have them use SEMrush on the title of the book and get some sample keywords of what people with commercial intent might include in a query.

After that, I would have them focus on books that are not best sellers - too much competition there.  They would also focus on higher price books with search volume - more profit there.

Don't try to save money by attacking with a rubber sword.  You know what will happen.

[LoganRay]

According to a recent comment by John Muller, duplicate content due to product descriptions isn't going to affect your ranking. I would leave the descriptions sent by the publisher and put your efforts into more needle-moving tasks.