Google’s John Mueller addressed the issue of how Google handles product descriptions that are identical for different items, resulting in duplicate content. Mueller downplayed any negative effects of the duplicate content and offered creative suggestions on how to help Google rank product pages for products that are largely similar.
Different Products with the Same Descriptions
The person who asked the question was concerned about how Google would handle ranking eCommerce web pages for products with similar descriptions.
This particular situation involved handmade shoes for a specific age group that is made with the same materials and techniques, with the only difference being in the shoe’s design.
The question asked was:
“Would it be counted as duplicate content by Google if I write one …high quality product description for all?
Or is it better to have unique descriptions for each one, which reduces the quality of the content?”
The presence of unique content does not imply a reduction in content quality
Mueller began his response by questioning whether having unique content would reduce the quality of the content. He claimed that product descriptions could be both distinctive and of high quality.
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Google does not penalize websites for duplicate content
John Mueller then returned to the main topic of duplicate content.
Mueller continued:
“We would probably see this as duplicate content but we would not demote a website because of duplicate content.
So from a practical point of view, what would happen is if someone is searching for a piece of text that is within this duplicated description on your pages, then we would recognize that this piece of text is found on a bunch of pages on your website and we would try to just pick maybe one or two pages from your website to show.
So it’s not that we would demote your website or… penalize the website in any way because it has duplicate content.”
It makes no sense to display multiple pages of the same content
Mueller went on to explain that Google limits the number of similar pages from the same site that appear in search results for practical reasons.
John Mueller said:
“It’s more from a practical point of view we recognize you have this content on a lot of your pages.
So if someone is searching specifically for that content it doesn’t make sense for us to show all of those pages.
And that’s… reasonable when people are searching for a piece of content.
They don’t need to find all of the pages within your website that have that piece of content.”
How to Assist Google in Ranking Related Products
Mueller then emphasized the importance of using text to describe how the products look. He cautioned that failing to adequately describe the appearance of a product may have a negative impact on search presence.
Mueller continued his answer with this bit of cautionary advice:
“The thing I think to… watch out for here is if you don’t have anything in the textual content at all that covers… the visual element of your products, then it makes it very hard for us to actually show these properly in the search results.
So for example, you mentioned you have handmade shoes. If you have blue shoes and red shoes and you never mentioned which color these shoes are in, then if someone is searching for blue shoes, we might think, well your pages are not that relevant because you don’t mention the word blue anywhere on your pages.
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.
So that’s kind of the direction I would go.”
Google finds it difficult to rank pages with duplicate content
Mueller stated that Google will not penalize a website for duplicate content. However, he also stated that a lack of text content describing the visual quality of a product makes it more difficult for Google to rank those pages.
So, if the product descriptions of similar products are the same, try to find words to accurately describe the big and small things that make the individual product different, such as what its intended use is, but John specifically encouraged eCommerce publishers to focus on writing text that describes what makes one product visually different from another product.
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