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We are building a ecommerce with a inventory of about 6000 products, the problem is most of the products have the same description so we decided to keep description as noindex and make it available to users to prevent the issue of duplicate content.

I heard that it will be a big impact if there is no product description how to tackle this problem, is this true?

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2 Answers

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If you have no descriptive text for your products you will have lots of "thin content" pages that will not be viewed favorably by search engines such as Google.

On the other hand, if you have repeated descriptions you will have lots of "duplicate content" that will not be viewed favorably, either.

Unfortuantely, there simply is no automated solution to this. You should try to create custom descriptions for each product. You may be able to use a server-side algorithm for some of this. You also can encourage user-generated content such as reviews and ratings to increase the uniqueness of each page.

If that is simply not possible, as a last resort I would try to eliminate thin & duplicate content issues by simply refusing to give each product its own URL. Organize products by categories and display multiples per page... this will ensure that all of your pages have worthwhile and non-duplicate content. (Ideally each product has a unique URL, but if you cannot fill unique content it is better to avoid that altogether.)

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thanks for advice can you recommend any plugin to create custom descriptions for word press ? is it good to do it as we can change only some words and the remaining content will remain same cause its a must – Prakash Moturu Nov 16 '12 at 22:32
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What do you mean you decided to keep descriptions as noindex? Isn't the product description displaying on the product page? If you don't have product descriptions setup product features so that each page has an ordered list of features of the product. Color size etc.

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its displaying but i used googleoff tag to not index the product description cause all of it is same for 5000 products – Prakash Moturu Nov 16 '12 at 22:29
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That tag only works with Google Appliance it is not recognized by Googlebot which crawls the web. – Anagio Nov 16 '12 at 22:31
What shopping cart are you using? – Anagio Nov 16 '12 at 22:32
woocommerce ? can you explain it a bit more please cause it will be a disaster – Prakash Moturu Nov 16 '12 at 22:34
any other way to prevent indexing of certain part of content not entire content ? – Prakash Moturu Nov 16 '12 at 22:35
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