What is the better of 2 evils? Duplicate Product Descriptions or Thin Content?
-
It is quite labour intensive to come up with product descriptions for all of our product range ... +2500 products, in English and Spanish...
When we started, we copy pasted manufacturer descriptions so they are not unique (on the web), plus some of them repeat each other -
We are getting unique content written but its going to be a long process, so, what is the best of 2 evils, lots of duplicate non unique content or remove it and get a very small phrase from the database of unique thin content?
Thanks!
-
Very good answer - and yes, 2 bad choices but limited resources means I must choose one. Either that or Meta NOINDEX the dupes for the moment until they are re-written.
-
Good idea. Thank you.
-
I agree with you Kurt. In our space we see duplicate content everywhere, from manufacturer's sites to vendors to resellers. There is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." Google doesn't penalize duplicate content. They may choose to ignore it, which may feel like a penalty, but that's not technically what's going on.
I also agree with EGOL. If getting a lot of product descriptions is a daunting task, hire some writers. You can get it done for way less that you think. Need inspiration? Watch Fabio's video from MozCon 2012 where in 15-minutes he describes how he and his team created thousands of unique product descriptions in a very short amount of time without spending a lot of money: http://moz.com/videos/e-commerse-seo-tips-and-tricks
Cheers!
Dana
-
I'd take duplicate content over thin content. There are tons of eCommerce sites out there with duplicate product descriptions. I don't think that Google is going to penalize you, per se, they just might not include your pages in the search results in favor of whatever site they think is the originator of the content.
The reason I think duplicate content is better is users. Either way your search traffic is probably not going to be too great. With duplicate, the SE's may ignore your pages and with thin content you haven't given them a reason to rank you. But at least with some real content on the pages you may be be able to convert the visitors you do get.
That said, I like Egol's suggestion. Don't write new product descriptions yourself. Hire a bunch of people to do it so they can crank out the new content real quick.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Tom... that is some of the best that I have seen in a long time.
Thanks!
-
Nothing like a bit of hyperbole to brighten up a Tuesday, is there?!
-
I'd rather deal with the duplicate content. Personally I'd bounce quicker with Thin or no content than I would with the same content on a different but similar product page. Of course I wouldn't let the duplicate content sit there and hurt me... I'd add canonicals to pages that were similar. Now if it was the exact same content everywhere then that'd drive me nuts. But if I can look at all the products, realize how many are the same with a minor variation and how many truly different product types... then I could write content for fewer pages and consolidate link equity with the canonical without worrying about duplicate content penalizing me. Of course I could always just NoIndex those duplicate pages instead.
-
With a gun to my head....
lol... Wow. That is a great way to word this.
So, my response is, yes, put a gun to my head and I will pick between these two bad choices.
Really, if you are paying someone to write all of this content you can hire one writer and have them take a year to do it... or you can hire 12 writers and have the job done in a month. Same cost either way.
-
With a gun to my head - I'd say thin content is "better" than mass duplicate content.
This is only based on helping to remove penalties from clients' sites - I see more instances of a Panda penalty when duplicate content is present rather than 'thin' content, as it were.
However, it's important to understand how the algorithm works. It will penalise pages based on content similarity - so if a page has thin content on it - ie not a lot to differentiate it from another page on the domain - technically, Google will see it as a duplicate page, with thin content on it.
Now, my line of thinking is that if there is more content on the page, but the majority of it is duplicate - ie physically more duplicate content on the page - then Google would see this as "worse". Similarly, taking product descriptions from one domain to another, and having duplicate content from other domains, seems to be penalised more frequently than the Panda algorithm than just thin-content pages (at least in my experience).
Your mileage may vary on this, but if forced into a temporary solution, thin content may be better for SEO - but conversely worse for a user, as there is less about the product on the page. The best solution of course will be to rewrite the descriptions, but obviously there's a need for a temporary solution.
Hope this helps.
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 fix Duplicate Content Warnings on Pagination? Indexed Pagination?
Hi all! So we have a Wordpress blog that properly has pagination tags of rel="prev" and rel="next" set up for pages, but we're still getting crawl errors with MOZ for duplicate content on all of our pagination pages. Also, we are having all of our pages indexed as well. I'm talking pages as deep as page 89 for the home page. Is this something I should ignore? Is it hurting my SEO potentially? If so, how can I start tackling it for a fix? Would "noindex" or "nofollow" be a good idea? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jampaper0 -
Supplier Videos & Duplicate Content
Hi, We have some supplier videos the product management want to include on these product pages. I am wondering how detrimental this is for SEO & the best way to approach this. Do we simply embed the supplier YouTube videos, or do we upload them to our YouTube - referencing the original content & then embed our YouTube videos? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Http vs. https - duplicate content
Hi I have recently come across a new issue on our site, where https & http titles are showing as duplicate. I read https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https however, am wondering as https is now a ranking factor, blocked this can't be a good thing? We aren't in a position to roll out https everywhere, so what would be the best thing to do next? I thought about implementing canonicals? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Product Colours change on ecommerce store... similar descriptions.
Hi, In the case of a RED/GREEN/YELLOW coffeemaker for example, I have say 6 pages that are indexed in google. Now, I can write very unique content for each and that gives me 6 pages in SERPS. Or make it a configurable product? What is best, and how different would the description need to be - my feeling that just changing the word colour in the text would NOT be enough. Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Syndicating duplicate content descriptions - Can these be canonicalised?
Hi there, I have a site that contains descriptions of accommodation and we also use this content to syndicate to our partner sites. They then use this content to fill their descriptions on the same accommodation locations. I have looked at copyscape and Google and this does appear as duplicate content across these partnered sites. I do understand as well that certain kinds of content will not impact Google's duplication issue such as locations, addresses, opening times those kind of things, but would actual descriptions of a location around 250 words long be seen and penalised as duplicate content? Also is there a possible way to canonicalise this content so that Google can see it relates back to our original site? The only other way I can think of getting round a duplicate content issue like this is ordering the external sites to use tags like blockquotes and cite tags around the content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MalcolmGibb0 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0