Manufacturers Descriptions

Is this hurting my rankings?

[JoeHouse]

Hello Again

I have a site selling widgets. I have approximately 3000 plus items that I sell.

Because I have so many items and suppliers I generally use the manufacturer's descriptions for these items.

My suppliers do a great job with writing the descriptions on these items, so to save time I use them.

Is this hurting my rankings on google? Or does google take into account that they are item descriptions and therefore not penalized for.

If I am getting penalized for this, is there a way to correct this without having to change all 3000 plus item descriptions.

[tedster]

There's no risk of a true penalty here, but since you are duplicating the descriptions used elsewhere, that makes it a lot less likely for you to be featured for any search that would tap into keywords in those standardized product descriptions. It's more likely to be a filter situation, not a penalty or black mark against you.

Even if your site is not an affiliate, you might want read the comments from Adam Lasnik about Thin Affiliate pages [webmasterworld.com]. It seems quite relevant.

The question I'd ask is "what do these pages offer a Google Search user that is unique?"

[g1smd]

If you have the same product descriptions as many other sites then that could cause a problem. Duplicate Content issues are difficult.

If the page titles, and the meta description information, is also the same as on those other sites then you compound the problem a lot more.