- Is It Really Bad for SEO to Have Duplicate Product Descriptions?
- What Can You Do With Duplicate Product Descriptions? 9 Practical Tips You Can Use Right Away
- Duplicate Content Product Descriptions & SEO - The Takeaway
Is It Really Bad for SEO to Have Duplicate Product Descriptions?
Product descriptions are an indispensable part of every online store. They serve both users (who can learn about the features of a given item) and search engine robots (that can better understand your page, and decide what keywords should be assigned to it). So, what if you're dealing with duplicate product descriptions on your webiste? If you’re familiar with SEO and Google guidelines, you certainly know that unique, quality content is a must-have if you want to rank high. Why? Because using the same descriptions for various products leads to internal duplicate content and keyword cannibalization. As you may guess, these two definitely won’t help you reach the TOP10. In the beginning, it’s worth mentioning that according to John Mueller from Google, there is no need to write unique descriptions for each product variant and version. This is particularly applicable if you offer e.g., 100 color versions of one T-shirt. Google’s Search advocate states it’s simply a waste of time because Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content. While unique content helps Google crawl and rank particular pages, it’s not a necessity. Therefore, during the SEO process you should focus on writing unique, quality descriptions only for products and pages whose positions you want to improve:Mueller said that Google won’t demote a site for duplicate content. But he also said that a lack of text content that describes the visual quality of a product makes it harder for Google to rank those pages. - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/duplicate-product-descriptions/432167/#close
What Can You Do With Duplicate Product Descriptions? 9 Practical Tips You Can Use Right Away
If possible, it’s worth getting rid of duplicate product descriptions. SEO can’t be fully effective when important keywords on your website are cannibalized. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps that will help you solve the problem.1. Add Descriptions of Unique Visual Elements to the Text
If you offer 50 product versions in your online store, these products may somehow differ from each other. Otherwise, you’d simply sell one item, wouldn’t you?So that’s… the angle I would take here is it’s fine to have parts of the description duplicated. But I would definitely make sure that you at least have something in there that really has text about the visual elements that are unique to those individual products that you’re selling.
Great article!! Exactly what we are looking for on our new Shopify site.
Thank you for being clear and precise on actions to take instead of broad general statements.