Offering 300,00 widgets, each with descriptive text.

How to avoid duplicate content?

[trejim7]

Last year we launched an ecommerce website. The site was developed from the start with competent SEO consultants on board. Each widget (300,000 total) has a paragraph of descriptive text with a few variables to distinguish it. Each descriptive paragraph starts with the same sentence, and the following sentences show the variability. Words in "quotes" are the variables (4 words in this example). I mention this because I've read a few threads that claim dynamically generated text with the same starting text will eventually get ignored by the crawlers.

.......Our company offers widgets online, including a large selection of , "Jack Vettriano", and "People", prints. We also provide a wide range of framing choices, and strive to ensure our customers’ satisfaction with each piece we frame. You can search our inventory by art or décor style (including , Asian, Contemporary, Modern, Impressionistic, and Neo Classical), artist name (including "Vettriano", Picasso, Warhol, Dali, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Rockwell, Adams, and others), subject type (including "People", Landscape, Abstract, Portraits, Architecture, Animals, and Sports), colors, price range, size, and other qualities.

Choose our company as your online source for beautiful widgets, and we’ll custom-frame your favorite widgets and ship them directly to you..........

We're wondering if the search engines might see this as duplicate content? If so, would having 10 different first sentences, 10 different second sentences...etc, then having our CMS generate descriptive text by randomly picking a first sentence (from the ten), randomnly picking a second sentence...etc to generate a new paragraph, be enough to show the search engines this is not duplicate content? Each sentence would have key variables populated from the database.

Thank you. Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Jim

[janharders]

I've talked to a friend of mine about something similar, who's studying computer linguistics. he explained some basic techniques that could be used to discover duplicate (or near duplicate) content. those would definetly sound the alarm on your current situation.
the things he explained to me wouldn't work on every sentence, but focus on paragraphs and compare those, since you need a few more words, otherwise, you'd just get too many false positives. Judging from that, your idea with randomly (allthough, I wouldn't do them randomly, stick with it on a page between robot visits) chosen sentences should work just fine.

on the other hand: 300,000 widgets with the same descriptions sounds like you could boil them down to a few thousands and invest more time in individual descriptions, which both search engines and your customers would surely prefer.

[trejim7]

Thank you janharders. I will get to work.

Jim