Simsi - 7:29 pm on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm with bwmbwm on this one. This crosses over into the Retail thread, but if you have products that fall into different categories and you have pages for each category, then it stands that the descriptions will appear multiple times.

Thus without writing the same description in lots of different ways for each product (which isn't practical or even sensible) you are left with "boilerplate" content. At least, that's how it sounds as if Google will see it, although the user is likely to benefit from having the products organised clearly into categories if relevant.

The idea of duplicate content on the same website causing a penalty to rankings doesn't sound fair to implement until the algo can automatically work out how the data on the site is categorised. Not easy I'm sure, but...

Cheers

Simsi

[edited by: Simsi at 7:30 pm (utc) on Dec. 19, 2006]