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
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
-
Why competitors rank with no content & filters
We're investing a lot in on-page content and creating categories/sub categories to target relevant keywords. Although it seems competitors with high domain authorities are clearly dominating in the SERPs and the pages have NO content. They are literally filters that create landing pages. For example when you search "Kaydian Beds", Debenhams rank below the manufacturer with just a filtered page, this page has not been optimised with content to target the keywords, only the META title changes depending on the chosen filter. Link: http://www.debenhams.com/furniture/beds/kaydian Our link: https://kontenta.co.uk/brands/kaydian-beds.html This is very frustrating as quality content should beat pages with little or no content, we will spend some time and get some inbound links to the page to try boost the rankings but does anyone have any similar experiences with anything like this?
Competitive Research | | Jseddon921 -
Expiring Domains by Content
I use sites such as expireddomains.com and Snap Name sin searching for expired domains. All these sites let you do a keyword search based on the domain name, but does anyone know a site that lets you search by the CONTENT of the site rather than just the name? Thanks, Kevin
Competitive Research | | Ebtec0 -
How to approach link building/content in my weight loss coaching niche in a large scale way
Hello, I run a weight loss coaching business, bobweikel.com that is in it's early stages. I'm still working on making it graphically appealing I want to increase my number of national clients - it's coaching done over the phone or skype. I'm needing help analyzing my niche, specifically keywords, article content topics, link building tactics. I want to put a lot of time into it. Eventually I want to scale it up and hire other weight loss coaches and even SEO help. How do I get this dream going through gaining national clients online? There's not much traffic locally. I'm enough of an authority that, with enough time, I can create kickass content on the topics of weight loss and also the topic of NLP (NLP is the type of coaching I do, but it's little known) I'd like to add 5 best-of-the-web articles and a blog. Looking for advice. Would like to dream big. Tools I normally use (though I'm open to anything): OSE, Link Prospector, Excel Pivot Tables, Buzzstream, iPhone 5S video camera with tripod, youtube video embed, keyword discovery
Competitive Research | | BobGW0 -
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 -
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 -
Thoughts on Nofollow My Account / Shopping Cart Pages on an eCommerce Website
I recently noticed most of my competitors (eCommerce sites) have linked to pages within their sites that do not always contain product information (my account, shopping cart, etc) using rel="nofollow". My site does not currently do this. Are there any advantages to using rel="nofollow" on similar pages on our site? Any disadvantages?
Competitive Research | | Gordian0 -
Working through the slides on my first seo project, I'm trying to determine the most popular content on competition sites.
From the video, I understand I should be looking for unique opportunities. But is there a baseline for product qualification, ie., a min. PA,LRD, Inbound LInks, social shares, etc. I guess I'm asking what I should be looking for in the data provided on each competing site? What determines THE most popular and unique product?
Competitive Research | | AhmadS0 -
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