Duplicate content: technical specs on ecommerce website

[chucky]

I manage an ecommerce site. Obviously there are plenty of other sites selling the same stuff.

The products description, technical spec and usage info are all usually copied from the manufacturer like most other sites.

I'm having all the descriptions re-written to avoid duplicate content.

The technical spec is quite large, probably equal to the description.

Would this still trigger the duplicate content filter? Baring in mind that the product names and manufacturer names will be the same as other people in the industry.

How about if I put an no index tag on just the spec and let Google crawl the unique descriptions.

[tedster]

That's a common challenge on ecommerce sites. The rewriting is a good idea - and if the technical specs are on a different url, blocking indexing there might be a good thing (hard to say 100% for sure, because each site is so different).

If it's not too hard to do, you might be better off blocking those specs through robots.txt - that is, if the urls fall into an easy pattern for wild card pattern matching. I say this, because googlebot comes to each domain with a kind of "crawl budget". To see the meta noindex on a page, it needs to crawl that page. But if it's blocked through robots.txt, that frees up some crawl budget for the rest of your site.