Duplicate content

[bandini]

Hi. I'm working for a small company in Barcelona and we have recently uploaded a 9000+ catalogue to out PrestaShop site. Since the volume of products is so high and we didn't have a specific short description for each, we created a generic short desciption and included the same one for every product. Are we risking a penalty for this? It's 3-4 lines that are repeated on every product page. Thank you.

[jetx]

A decent SEO mod might help by adding tags to the meta desciption including name, id, ref. This would make each one unique.

[NemoPS]

You might get penalized if your meta titles/descriptions are identical among different pages. Otherwise it shouldn't be a big deal to have 4-5 identical lines, as the rest of the page is (supposedly?) different

[isabella_brown]

why don't you write short descriptions for each category rather writing for each product individually. It will not duplicate your content and customers get relevant information too about the specific category.

[PrestaHeroes USA]

why don't you write short descriptions for each category rather writing for each product individually. It will not duplicate your content and customers get relevant information too about the specific category.

 

I think the issue with not having short  desc in product is age old problem where themes pull short and long desc for display.  For me it would be nicer cms if say short pulled from long with 'read more' button like a true cms.

 

because at the end of the day, short and long description is  duplicate data which breaks the rule of  rdms

 

happy prestashopping

[Dh42]

If more than 80% of the on page text is the same between any two or more given pages you are risking a penalty on the page. It is a per page penalty, not a whole site penalty. 

[johnwolf]

Agree with all above answers. You will got a sure penalty in this case. So only solution is to write separate content for all products. An initial step you can take is to remove content from all the product pages and make them live. Then slowly update the content for all pages. 

[Christiaan_01]

Writing unique content for > 1000 products is nearly impossible.

In my case similar products do have a few parameters that change, like colour or material.

I make use of standard templates (descriptions) and fill in the parameters so at least it's not 100% duplicate.

 

Apart from that I recently bought the module 'Duplicate content handler'.

This gives you the option to add a canonical tag on the product page, pointing to another product.

For example, you have 3 similar products A, B & C.

In product B and C you can enter A as the canonical product, so that Google understands which is the main product.

[johnwolf]

Although canonical tags are fine when in the case of @bandani, this is not useful because these tags are used when one product is assessed by multiple urls but here in this case product are different from each other. 

[selectshop.at]

Sure you will get penalized. Short description is not a must have, BUT unique content and a good long description, as well as Meta-tags with unique content is a MUST HAVE. For to create descriptions, you can use tools. I used this for a catalog of 5.000 products without any problems. You should compose variables with some fix text. Worked well, but is not really the 100% solution.

 

http://addons.prestashop.com/de/seitenadministration-module/2967-generate-auto-description.html - ask the developer for PS 1.6. version, I was using this in PS 1.4. and than he adpted me the module for PS 1.5. With this module you will have a similar solution Christian_001 suggested.

 

If I were you, I will deactivate all products without description and day by day add unique content to them and activate the products reworked. It is better to have nothing valuable indexed in form of 1.000 of products. à la long you will not have any profit with this quick solution. SEO has to grow up with the page.

[foduu1]

Hi, make the fresh content for all pages and meta tags and put, it will be good for seo point of view, don't use duplicate content