Ecommerce Duplicate Content
-
Hello Everyone
I would like to launch an ecommerce website. Most of the competitors in the same market are using some duplicate content for their product description
- What should I do?
- Use the same duplicate content knowing that everyone else is doing the same or rewrite it.
- Will I get penalized by Google if I use duplicate content?
- If I don’t will I get a better ranking that my competitors?
Thanks for your help
Joel
-
Thanks for your answer
-
Thanks for your answer
-
Alice is right. Taking the time to invest in unique content, descriptions, image file names, alt tags and URLs are going to be make a big difference on an ecommerce site.
We sometimes assume that because we didn't rank for something it is a penalty when in reality it was just never indexed like we wanted it to. You product and category pages may do a little Google wiggle in the beginning but that is common. Usually it take me a few weeks to see have a good idea of where my product pages will rank and then optimize from there. Don't assume that because you showed up in the top of the rankings at first and then dropped back that it is a penalty. It is usually just the algorithm's way of evaluation the place of the page in that SERP.
Created quality unique content for a researched keyword, watch the results, analyse the data and then rinse and repeat.
-
Hi Joel.
Where possible it's always beneficial to write unique product descriptions. It can be tempting just to copy and paste the manufacturer's nice, professionally written description, but unfortunately this is problematic from an SEO perspective.
Penalisation for using the manufacturer's descriptions is unlikely, but pages containing duplicate content aren't likely to rank well. If you want to rank above your competitors (and hopefully gain some deep link juice to those all-important product pages), you have to offer something unique.
In an ideal world you'd have completely unique, appealing descriptions for every product. At the very least, focus on producing great descriptions for your best sellers or best earners.
It's definitely worth harnessing the potential of user-generated content through reviews and questions and answers. This is a great, low-cost way to add unique and useful content.
Good luck!
Alice
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
-
Non ecommerce site with high DA, being outranked by lower DA sites with ecommerce - help?
I have a website that we look after, up until January this year the rankings were really strong - the site has a much higher domain authority than the competitors, much more links and much more relevant content (all measured with moz's tools). About 6 months ago the rankings started to dive for national search terms. Now one thing ive noticed is that nearly all of the other sites in the search sell products online where we have no such function - could this be correlated - has anyone else experienced this?
Competitive Research | | rhysc1 -
I need Ecommerce Site who have implemented J-Son Schema for Blog
Hi All, Just I need few sites who have implemented J-son schema on there blog. Looking for ecommerce blog. Hope you guys share with me good site. Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | amu1232 -
Long tail keywords / Close variations of keywords / Duplicate Content
In a classified site, people usually search for the same item with different keywords which are often very close to each other and point to same set of results: e.g. honda civic for sale
Competitive Research | | razasaeed
used honda civic for sale
civic for sale
used civic for sale
used civic All the above keywords should actually lead to same results i.e honda civic for sale. Our competitor is creating a page for each one of these www.sitename.com/q/honda-civic-for-sale/
www.sitename.com/q/used-honda-civic-for-sale/
... and so on Basically they create a page for each high traffic keyword they encounter where as we have very structure search. How to compete with that ? They are ranking on all these long tail keywords because of separate landing pages though most of the pages are duplicate of each other. 98% same content (all are showing honda civics) Should we go that route OR optimize our single page focusing on keyword with highest traffic and hope google will rank us for the related keywords as well ?0 -
Could duplicate content be helpful to the original source?
Greetings Mozzers, I'm wondering if duplicate content could potentially function as a "link" in Google's eyes. Since they know I have content first and then someone else just uses it, Google could maybe think of that as a recommendation that the content is good? Reason I ask is, when I first starting going after a keyword for a company I wanted to go after two (2) separate regions, let's say "San Antonio" and "Dallas". My non-region based keyword started to rank for "San Antonio Keyword" because the content on the San Antonio page was too closely related. So i'm wondering if maybe having that content so close/duplicate may have boosted the original page because it was kind of like a recommendation? Thoughts, Information, Clarification, any and all are welcome and appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
How Do You Create an excel spreadsheet of all blog post content on a site?
Is there a quick and easy way to create an excel spreadsheet with a list of all blog content and it's SEO factors i.e. URL, title, description, etc.? I know I could use screaming from to get the entire site but is there a way to just get the content on the blog?
Competitive Research | | RonMedlin0 -
What are the pros and cons of putting all content under directory named after target keyword?
The question sounds complicated but is actually quite simple. We want to rank high for the keyword "publicity". Here are some facts: Google Keyword Research: Competition 0.02 & Global monthly searches: 22,200 SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool: highly competitive We are producing plenty of editorial content every day on our online magazine which right now resides under http://mag.publiseek.com and we are thinking of renaming the magazine: "Publicity" and moving it to http://publiseek.com/publicity That way every new article will be under the publicity subdirectory. Of course we would redirect all the existing articles under the old structure to the new one using 301's. And we're hoping that with time we get the top position for the keyword publicity. I am interested to hear from the experts out there what are the pros and cons of this approach?
Competitive Research | | davhad0 -
Content Ideas in a limited market
I've hit a road block of sorts and my mind is having trouble thinking out of the box. I'm in a relatively small niche with a roofing product called snow guards. I am struggling with ways to build links and content for my website at www.roofthings.com. I've used some forums, blogs, and directories. After going through my competitors link data, it seems that one of the biggest links they have that I don't is a DMOZ listing, but that can take awhile and I have submitted about 7 months ago. It also appears that a lot of their links I cannot get are coming from construction magazines they paid to be in. I don't have that kind of budget at this time and so I'm trying to compete via organic rankings. My biggest thing I am struggling with is how to gain more back links. My biggest competitor has over 40,000 links compared to my 2700. I'm somewhat new to SEO and am just looking for a couple suggestions. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | kadesmith0 -
Competitor with over 100,000 links to duplicate copy ranks well, anyone know why?
One of our competitors has over 100,000 links on Yahoo site explorer, most of them are from pages on their site with duplicate content and they don't seem to have a focus on gaining backlinks, but the site still ranks really well. Can anyone think of a reason why this duplicate content hasn't been penalised by Google?
Competitive Research | | RobertHill0