Product Descriptions (SEO)

[mattl99]

Hello,

I sell products relating to wood. Although the products vary, I like to give description of the wood type for the customers who might not be familiar with it. Will it hurt my rankings to give the same descriptions for the same wood type as long as the majority of the description is different? Here is an example of the layout:

1. Different description for different products

2. The same short description for the same wood types (seen throughout multiple pages)

Hopefully my question makes sense.

[effectdigital]

What a niche, interesting question!

You could mean two things here, an on-page snippet that describes the product - or the Meta description which is strictly machine-read and which is used in Google's results (though not as a ranking factor! I'll get to this in a minute)

If you mean an on-page description, having duplicate snippets (so long as they are very small) with one changed word or term is not, by itself in isolation - likely to Garner a Google Panda penalty or algorithmic devaluation. If however the description is really the only unique element on the page, you may be at some small to moderate risk of that. But here's the thing - SEO is a competitive environment. Just because you don't get a penalty for not doing the best thing - does that mean you shouldn't do it? If one of your competitors is supplying more in-depth, better, more unique (value-add) information then they will outrank you (so long as their popularity / authority and trust metrics are similar to your own). Small comfort will it be, that you have no penalty - if your results for product URLs suck. Will it matter to you why you aren't getting traffic? Probably not - the commercial outcome could be the same

If you mean the Meta description, it probably won't matter very much at all - but let me lay some knowledge on you. Just because Meta descriptions have no special place in Google's ranking algorithm(s) that doesn't mean they can't benefit your SEO. But how can that be!? OK - so it's known that Meta descriptions (well written ones) have an elevated chance of forming SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) snippets in Google's results. If your ranking position contains text which does a better job of compelling a Google user to click through to your website, it stands to reason that writing decent Meta descriptions can make your existing ranking positions supply more traffic and work harder for you (without even shifting). Neat huh? The key of course is that Meta descriptions should be written from a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) perspective and not from a keyword / SEO perspective.

So - now you know. Do your best to compete and elevate yourself above others by supplying deeper, value-add (for end users) content on-page. In terms of Meta, CRO makes traffic flow!

Hope this was helpful

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

1- If you are referring to the descriptions to be shown in Google SERPs: Meta descriptions, there is no direct SEO harm in having them all the same. Although, having a specific description for each product/page could potentially improve CTR. If it is possible, optimize those to have better SERP performance.

2- If you refer to the content on the page, for each product, those need to be different so as google understands that they are not nearly duplicate and considers that many pages only respond to the same user intent or to only a few number of Google search terms.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

[joramtenham]

Hi,

If indeed the majority of the content is unique to each product I don't think this will harm your SEO efforts. The alternative would be creating individual pages for the different wood types and place the description there. You can than link to one of those pages from the product pages. From an UX perspective this might not be an ideal solution though.