Can Homepage Suffer If Item Pages Use Duplicate Content?

[JoeHouse]

I am wondering, if you own a site selling widgets and your homepage is completely 100% unique but your item pages use the manufacturer descriptions, will your homepage suffer from a filter for your main keyword you are trying to rank for?

I have owned a site for 3 years now and I cannot rank for my main keyword. I have done all the other things right as far as on page and off page seo but yet my site does not rank for my main keyword.

My homepage is completely unique. The only thing I am not doing is writing my item descriptions because I have over 3000 items. I copy and paste the manufacturer descriptions.

Can this one of the main reasons my website is not ranking for this main keyword?

Should I take the time to rewrite all the titles and descriptions to make they unique?

Will the results from changing all these items be worth the time and effort in regards to rankings? Will it make the difference between top 100 to possibly top 10?

[tedster]

Yes, yes and yes.

Especially in this age of human editorial input at Google, your site needs to show some standout feature or service for the traffic you hoope Google will send. And unique titles and meta descriptions are exceptionally important for any page - but especially any inner pages that don't have strong PR.

[JoeHouse]

Okay then if thats the case, if I rewrite the titles and descriptions will Google forgive me and start to rank my homepage and inner pages as a result?

Will they recognize my efforts? Will they begin to consider my site a trusted site? Or is the damage already done?

[JoeHouse]

Is it common google search engine practice that if they detect duplicate content (manufacturers descriptions) on product items to be removed completely from the index? Or possibly so far down in rankings that you cannot even locate them?

I have over 300+ items which ALL have manufacturers descriptions and I cannot locate hardly any at all that rank on google.

Here is what I think is going on. These items are also listed on Amazon with the same exact content. Because Amazon is a trusted site as well as the manufacturers websites who created these descriptions, my website is probably considered a copy site and therefore no rankings.

So do you think I need to create and rewrite totally new unique content for my website to get good google rankings? If I take on this huge project will I start to see better results quickly in regards to top rankings?

[tedster]

Of course there can be no certainty here, but moving away from duplicating the text on Amazon can only be a positive for you.

[jimbeetle]

Rewriting 300+ product descriptions can be a bit daunting. What I might consider doing is a first run through the pages rewriting the title elements, meta descriptions (if you don't currently use them do so now as they can help in disambiguating content), and the H1 element (again, if you don't use them as yet, throw them in). Then go on to rewriting the product descriptions.

[netmeg]

Do you have category pages? One thing I've had some success with was concentrating on filling up the category pages with unique content, in cases where I have a lot of very similar product pages.

[JoeHouse]

Yes I have category pages. My main problem is I cannot get the individual product item pages to rank at all.

I highly suspect that its because ALL my product descriptions are copy/paste manufacturer descriptions.

I read some where that when this happens Google only selects one site, most likely a trusted site and will rank well just that one site while the other sites with the dup content get either removed from the indexed completely or so far down in ranking that is won't matter anyways.

I suffer from the first where my pages don't even show. The only traffic I receive is from froogle product pages and other search engines but not on google. My site is indexed because I check regularly however I am not ranking at all for the dup item pages.

With everything else being equal or close to it, the only difference is my competitors who rank well use unique content for their item pages where I do not.

Also because of this I believe I cannot get my homepage to rank well for my main keyword. All stemming from what I believe is a dup content filter.

Has anybody else experience this with dup content?