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
-
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 -
Ecommerce Website Product Rich Snippet Image
Greetings Mozzers, I'm working on an ecommerce site and my goal is to have the product rich snippets on each of them however, I would like an image to start displaying in the SERPs. Looking for some guidance on this issue. Here is a well phrased questioned I found that sums up my thoughts: Product schema has the "image" attribute, but it is not displayed in rich snippets in SERP. However, there is recipe schema and it allows to show image directly on SERP. It means that we can define two entities on a page (product and recipe, it is allowed) and it should display an image from recipe's part + the rest of information (price, availability) from product's part. I know it is a dirty hack and semantically incorrect, but will it work? If so, would it affect rankings or not? Any other drawbacks? Thank you for any advice/clarification!
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 -
Duplicate content for www & non-www results
why would my campaign show duplicate content entries for www & non-www versions of my url? Here's an example I have a page called 'mydomain.com/resources/', and the campaign analysis shows it as being duplicate content, with the duplicate being 'www.mydomain.com/resources'. I don't know where I can adjust this or if it is perhaps related to some other setting, like Google Analytics or something else. /G
Competitive Research | | swdmedia0 -
What if your content is way better than competitors?
Do you have any suggestions if you are being outranked by competitors even though your page has way better content and better links?
Competitive Research | | Charlessipe0 -
Tool to scan contents of a page and see it through Google's eyes?
Does anyone know of a tool that can be used to input a URL and have it spit out keywords of how Google could possible see what the contents of that page is about?
Competitive Research | | shawn810 -
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