Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce Duplicate Product Descriptions across 3 websites
-
Hi,
We are an e commerce company that has our own domain but also sell the same products on eBay and Amazon. What is the feeling on the same exact descriptions being used on different platforms? Do they count as duplicate content? Will our domain be punished/penalised as our domain does not have as much authority as EBay or Amazon?
We have over 5,000 products with our own hand written product descriptions. We want our website to be the main place/ have priority over the above market places. What's the best suggestion/solution?
thanks,
-
Thank you for all your help.
We do think it is down to Ebay and Amazon having more authority over our domain which has in turn bought our rankings down.
As we move forward we'll cut Ebay and Amazon's description down and see how this goes. I guess a long-term strategy would be to write unique content for all. But this is very time consuming for over 5000 unique products.
Thanks,
-
The sure thing is that your domain won't be punished/penalised. But it might affect a bit, so I suggest you to summarize your products' description in order to be sure & without doubts.
Sometimes it's positive to summarize your descriptions because it can make it easier and more comfortable for buyers to read.
-
I agree with Dennis about the changes on Pinterest. They are truely great for webshops.
I do have a little warning though. Ebay and Amazon are really big and authoritive websites which will rank above your own website for those products. There could be duplicate content issues for this and from what i've heard you would get punished for your own descriptions because Amazon and Ebay are so authoritive that you would get the penalty yourself.
So be careful about selling on Amazon and Ebay.
Hope my answer was helpful.
-
Hi Roy
I would make sure the descriptions are different on each. If not, at least make the one's on your page different.
Next would be to make sure your categories have unique description/content as well. It goes a long way.
BTw, no, it's not going to be a duplicate penalty, it will just help you rank them all better and easier.
and with the current tests of google omitting results, you might get your site omitted instead of the copies.
You might also want to take a look at pinterest with your ecom site.
Their new changes are amazing -
Hey Roy,
I haven't worked with ecommerce sites that also sell on stores such as Amazon, but I've found an interesting answer to a question very similar to yours, here: http://moz.com/community/q/amazon-product-descriptions-and-our-website-s-product-descriptions
As a solution, you could try feeding Amazon/Ebay only a small excerpt of the description, and not linking from your main site to the Amazon/Ebay products.
Cheers
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
-
How to fully index big ecommerce websites (that have deep catalog hierarchy)?
When building very large ecommerce sites, the catalog data can have millions of product SKUs and a massive quantity of hierarchical navigation layers (say 7-10) to get to those SKUs. On such sites, it can be difficult to get them to index substantially. The issue doesn’t appear to be product page content issues. The concern is around the ‘intermediate’ pages -- the many navigation layers between the home page and the product pages that are necessary for a user to funnel down and find the desired product. There are a lot of these intermediate pages and they commonly contain just a few menu links and thin/no content. (It's tough to put fresh-unique-quality content on all the intermediate pages that serve the purpose of helping the user navigate a big catalog.) We've played with NO INDEX, FOLLOW on these pages. But structurally it seems like a site with a lot of intermediate pages containing thin content can result in issues such as shallow site indexing, weak page rank, crawl budget issues, etc. Any creative suggestions on how to tackle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AltosDigital-10 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
We have two different websites with the same products and information, will that hurt our rankings?
We have two different domains, one for the UK and the other for the US, they have the exact same products, categories and information. (the information is almost the same in 400 products) We know that Google could recognize that as duplicate content, but will that actually hurt our rankings in both sites? Is it better if we create two completely different versions of the content on those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.
We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site. We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this? We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue; adding "no index" to all filtered pages making the filters uncrawble using javascript Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Copying my Facebook content to website considered duplicate content?
I write career advice on Facebook on a daily basis. On my homepage users can see the most recent 4-5 feeds (using FB social media plugin). I am thinking to create a page on my website where visitors can see all my previous FB feeds. Would this be considered duplicate content if I copy paste the info, but if I use a Facebook social media plugin then it is not considered duplicate content? I am working on increasing content on my website and feel incorporating FB feeds would make sense. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0