Using duplicate product descriptions on ecommerce pages?

[tomajacar]

Hello,

I would appreciate your advice on an SEO question...
For a new ecommerce site, I am using product description that already exists elsewhere on the web and in the google index.

Should I:
- display it together with the rest of the content but create duplicate content for part of my page
- hide it from search engines using some javascript and rely on the page title, h1 tags etc... and unique content such as user's reviews ?

thank you for your help

[tedster]

If you added significant unique copy in the product description, then I wouldn't complicate things by trying to hide the manufacturer's "standardized" information. In fact, it may even help bring in some rankings.

[Bewenched]

Honestly I'd put the manufacturer information in an IFRAME. That way you dont get the duplication of the basic content.

[bwnbwn]

Being in the business it is really very hard to rewrite the content in a way it is unique. You have to be very careful on the wording and it is very hard to define red but only a few ways. I doctor mine up a tad now as I add new items. I know it won't cover the 80% rule and would be more than likely considered duplicate but Google is aware of this and it is part of the web with 1000's of sites selling the same product.

If I had to really rewrite all my product to be unique it would cost me 10s of thousands of dollars in man hours.

If like you said your brand new then I suggest this. Pick the most popular items and do them first. Rewrite the content as they go up and continue to do it for each and every product you add. This will keep you from being like me have 1000's of products up before there was such a thing as duplicate content, and really can't afford to go back and spend the massive amount of time redoing them.

I would love to have my content unique and suggest you spend the time to make yours. 12 years ago I started my ecommerce site and if I knew then duplicate content would come into the web this is what I would have done.

[tomajacar]

thank you so much for your replies. It really helps.
I did a bit of reading as well (excellent book btw "the art of seo" by Enge / Stricchiola / Fishkin / Spencer) and I am leaning toward hiding the affiliate content.
Rewriting the 50000+ product descriptions manually doesn't seem doable. We may be able to write description for new products though.
I think we'll focus our time and energy in writing unique content in the form of product reviews.
I am also thinking of automatically building new "unique" descriptions by assembling product's attributes (<name>, designed by >designer name>, is <height> inches high etc...). It has to be smart though and the syntax must be correct in all cases, which may be quite hard to achieve.