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
-
Country Code Top Level Domains & Duplicate Content
Hi looking to launch in a new market, currently we have a .com.au domain which is geo-targeted to Australia. We want to launch in New Zealand which is ends with .co.nz If i duplicate the Australian based site completely on the new .co.nz domain name, would i face duplicate content issues from a SEO standpoint?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
Even though it's on a completely separate country code. Or is it still advised tosetup hreflang tag across both of the domains? Cheers.0 -
How do we avoid duplicate/thin content on +150,000 product pages?
Hey guys! We got a rather large product range (books) on our eCommerce site (+150,000 titles). We get book descriptions as meta data from our publishers, which we display on the product pages. This obviously is not unique, as many other sites display the same piece of description of the book. It is important for us to rank on those book titles, so my question to You is: How would you go about it? I mean, it seems like a rather unrealistic task to paraphrase +150,000 (and growing) book descriptions. As I see it, there are these options: 1. Don't display the descriptions on the product pages (however then those pages will get even thinner!)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacob_Holm
2. Display the (duplicate) descriptions, but put no-index on those product pages in order not to punish the rest of the site (not really an option, though).
3. Hire student workers to produce unique product descriptions for all 150,000 products (seems like a huge and expensive task) But how would You solve such a challenge?
Thanks a lot! Cheers, Tommy.0 -
Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
How do I use public content without being penalized for duplication?
The NHTSA produces a list of all recalls for automobiles. In their "terms of use" it states that the information can be copied. I want to add that to our site, so there is an up-to-date list for our audience to see. However, I'm just copying and pasting. I'm allowed to according to NHTSA, but google will probably flag it right? Is there a way to do this without being penalized? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Canonical tags and product descriptions
I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions. A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions. It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag. I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters. Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet. So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions. I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i'). Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group. Does this seem a sensible thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Duplicate content across hundreds of Local sites and they all rank #1
Usually when we discuss duplicate content, we're addressing the topic of penalties or non-indexing. In this case, we're discussing ranking high with duplicate content. I've seen lots of dental, chiropractor and veterinarian sites built by companies that give them cookie cutter sites with the same copy. And they all rank #1 or #2. Here are two companies that do that:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse
http://www.rampsites.com/rampsites/home_standard.asp?sectionid=4
http://mysocialpractice.com/about/ The later uses external blogs to provide inbound links to their clients' site, but not all services do that, in fact, this is the first time I've seen them with external blogs. Usually the blog with duplicate copy is ON SITE and the sites still rank #1. Query "Why Your Smile Prefers Water Over Soft Drinks" to see duplicate content on external blogs. Or "Remember the Mad Hatter from the childhood classic, Alice in Wonderland? Back then, the process of making hats involved using mercury compounds. Overexposure could produce symptoms referred to as being" for duplicate content on chiropractor sites that rank high. I've seen well optimized sites rank under them even though their sites have just as much quality content and it's all original with more engagement and inbound links. It appears to me that Google is turning a blind eye on duplicate content. Maybe because these are local businesses with local clientele it doesn't care that a chiropractor in NY has the same content as one in CA, just as the visitor doesn't care because the visitor in CA isn't look at a chiropractor's site in NY generally. So maybe geo-targeting the site has something to do with it. As a test, I should take the same copy and put it on a non-geo-targeted site and see if it will get indexed. I asked another Local SEO expert if she has run across this, probably the best in my opinion. She has and she finds it difficult to rank above them as well. It's almost as if Google is favoring those sites. So the question is, should all dentists, chiropractors and veterinarians give it up to these services? I shudder to think that, but, hey it's working and it's a whole lot less work - and maybe expense - for them.0 -
Duplicate content on index.htm page
How do I avoid duplicate content on the index.htm page . I need to redirect the spider from the /index.htm file to the main root of http://www.manandhisvan.com.au and hence avoid duplicate content. Does anyone know of a foolproof way of achieving this without me buggering up the complete site Cheers Freddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatfreddy0