Let's open the can of worms called "Duplicate Content"

[SEO Lady]

A manufacturer sells 5,000 products online, the situation is that a large volume of product descriptions will have identical specs and dimensions.

The company has created product description unique text which due to the CMS is replicated for each of these category items. Roughly 30 different categories.

Some items are universal and pair with a parent product, just looking now there's one item with 50 compatible parent products so each of the the 50 parent products feature the item, and feature the same block of category specific text.

Siteliner throws up an 11% duplicate content figure which I'm pretty dismissive about, especially if it would take a lot of hours to override the CMS system and manually rewrite 4,999 product descriptions.

I don't think there's a situation here whereby the site will suffer a Google Duplicate Content penalty, but I'm holding the can opener in my hand and looking to discuss your thoughts..?

 

[fisicx]

Google is quite happy with this. What it doesn't like is the plumber that creates a different page for every postcode in his town with the same content on each in an attempt to improve ranking.

In any case, Google doesn't necessarily penalise you for repeating content, it just chooses the most suitable page and ignores the rest.

 

[SEO Lady]

Google is quite happy with this. What it doesn't like is the plumber that creates a different page for every postcode in his town with the same content on each in an attempt to improve ranking.

In any case, Google doesn't necessarily penalise you for repeating content, it just chooses the most suitable page and ignores the rest.

Have you tapped my Skype webcam? I honestly said this word for word earlier today with a case study.

 

[UKcentric]

Should be no problem. If it is good and useful and necessary for your users then don't worry about duplicate content and neither will Google. Develop websites for users, not search engines and you won't go far wrong.

 

[webgeek]

Use structured data/markup to make it clear to Google at a product level.

When you're putting the exact same thing in multiple categories, I would always opt for 1 master and the rest redirect or noindex or ick ick ick canonical.

 

[StevePoster]

Google is not new with duplicate content since then and on this ecommerce site they will select the most appropriate page for the query. However, the website must tell the search engine that this particular site page is the dominant page among the others.