Oliver_Henniges - 8:48 pm on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

asher02, I concede, I do see your point, so: did your site really suffer?

On the other hand: You gave an example with text snippets of - I guess - less than 300 characters per product. Do you really think it necessary to design a single page each with just these 300 characters as unique content? An alternative would be (as I said) to group these products together and present an "view-large-image" - link. The long-tail-argument, as you use it, doesn't work: If your customers are searching for those unique phrases, they will also occur on pages with several products and google will also index the phrases. Even better: the key phrases will automatically be repeated, which a search engine would expect, if these occur in the meta-tags.

I admit: If I intended to buy some jewelry online, I'd probably expect the site owner to put some care in his presentation. Maybe twelve watches or rings, each worth several k, might look a bit strange grouped on one page. But then I thought: If you stick to the "one product one page"-concept: Why not add some poetry on each page? Unique content, the product deserves it, flattered customers, and there's probably quite a number of poor poets out there looking for a job.

As Saint-Exupéry's "little prince" once put it: "It's the amount of time you spent with your rose, which makes this rose so important." I guess the same holds true for html-pages in the eyes of a search engine.