Google’s John Mueller addresses how Google handles identical product descriptions for different items, leading to duplicate content. Mueller downplayed any negative effects of duplicate content and offered creative suggestions on how to help Google better rank product pages for products that are substantially similar.
Different product but same description
The person asking this question is concerned about how Google will handle e-commerce page rankings for different products with similar descriptions.
This particular case involves handmade shoes for a specific age group made using the same materials and techniques, the only changes being in the design of the shoes.
The question asked is:
“If I write a…high-quality product description for everyone, will it be considered duplicate content by Google?
Or would it be better to have a unique description for each piece of content, which would reduce the quality of the content? “
John Mueller’s advice on how to deal with duplicate product descriptions
Unique content does not degrade content quality
Mueller first questioned whether unique content would degrade content quality. Product descriptions can be both unique and high-quality, he asserts.
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Google won’t downgrade sites with duplicate content
John Mueller then goes back to the main question about duplicate content.
Mueller continued:
“We may see it as duplicate content, but we won’t downgrade the site for duplicate content.
So from a practical standpoint, if someone searches for a piece of text in a duplicate description on your page, then we recognize that the piece of text is found on a bunch of pages on your site and we try to get it from your Select one or two pages from the website to display.
Therefore, we will not demote your site or… penalize it in any way for having duplicate content. “
It doesn’t make sense to display multiple pages of the same content
Mueller went on to explain that Google limiting the number of similar pages from the same site displayed in search results was just a practical consideration.
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John Mueller said:
“It’s more of a practical perspective, and we recognize that you have these on a lot of your pages.
So it doesn’t make sense to us to show all these pages if someone specifically searches for that content.
When people search for a piece of content, it’s…reasonable.
They don’t need to find all the pages on your site that contain that content. “
How to Help Google Rank Similar Products
Muller went on to stress the importance of using words to explain what a product looks like. He warned that failing to adequately describe what a product would look like could negatively impact search presence.
Mueller continued his answer with some cautionary advice:
“I think… the caveat is that if there’s nothing at all in the text content that covers… the visual elements of the product, then it’s going to be hard for us to show up in the search results.
For example, you mentioned that you have handmade shoes. If you have blue shoes and red shoes and you never mention the color of those shoes, then if someone is searching for blue shoes, we might think that your page isn’t that relevant because you don’t mention it anywhere to your page with the word blue.
So here it is… my point here is that part of the description can be copied. But I would definitely make sure you have at least something with text about the visual elements that are unique to those individual products you sell.
So that’s the direction I’m going. “
Duplicate content makes it hard for Google to rank pages
Mueller said Google would not downgrade sites for duplicate content. But he also said the lack of textual content describing the product’s visual quality makes it harder for Google to rank those pages.
So if product descriptions are the same for similar products, try to find words to accurately describe the things big and small that make a single product different, such as its intended use, but John especially encourages ecommerce publishers to focus on writing textual descriptions what makes a product visually appealing is different from another product.
Citation
How Google handles duplicate product descriptions
Watch the 45:10 minute mark
