Title and Description Duplicates - YouTube & site product pages

[vetofunk]

Hey Guys,

My family has a couple <widget> websites where they make custom <widgets>. Every <widget> is one of a kind. With every <widget> we make, we also do a video showing the item. It is hosted on Youtube.com. I noticed that when they were uploading the Youtube videos, they were using the same title and description for the videos as we have on our product pages.

So I did some searching and noticed that all the product pages on our site if you search for the products show up in the supplemental results. This is below scraper sites as well. Almost 100% of the time the Youtube video is in the 1st spot.

I plan on testing changing some of the product titles and descriptions on our website to see if this is the issue. Have you ever heard of Google penalizing and/or putting a website in the supplemental results when the descriptions and titles match?

Thanks!
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[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:50 pm (utc) on Dec 17, 2013]
[edit reason] exemplified product niche, per forum Charter [/edit]

[aakk9999]

Do you have any descriptive text on YouTube video and if you do, is the text on the YouTube video the same as the text on the website for this product? What about the length of the text, how does it compare between YouTube video and your website product page?

What I am getting at is - if your website product page has pretty much the same content as the YouTube video, then this could be the reason for having your web page in supplemental and ranking YouTube page instead.

In which case you would need to change more than just the title.

[vetofunk]

Yes, the description and title are the exact same. Both Youtube and our product page have exactly the same information.

[Robert Charlton]

Are you using some kind of submission service?

They often submit your title and description to many "video streaming sites", which basically embed your YouTube video and re-duplicate your title and text content. I have seen all but the YouTube page disappear for the exact title. Some of the sites that vary the titles will rank for an exact search.

As aakk9999 explained, duplicate content, particularly with duplicated titles, can cause your product page to go Supplemental. Is there any differentiation at all between your product page title and the YouTube video title?

I plan on testing changing some of the product titles and descriptions on our website to see if this is the issue.

It sounds like you're taking the right approach. You need to add more content to your product page and at least slightly change the title. Is the video on your site on a page by itself, or is it on the product page that includes other product information?

Chances are you also don't have much link equity on your site, but I'm just guessing.

[aakk9999]

Yes, the description and title are the exact same. Both Youtube and our product page have exactly the same information.

Just to clarify - when said "description" I did not mean "meta description".

I meant "product description on the youtube page". That is, the text that shows on the YouTube page under the video.

If this text is the same (or almost the same) as the text on your product page, then you have a duplicate content issue between YouTube and your own product page. And it seems that in this case Google has picked up YouTube page to display in SERPs rather than the page from your site.

On the YouTube page I would change this text as well as <title>.

[vetofunk]

We aren't using any submission service. Basically we create a product page with a product name and a product description, then we create a short video and use the same product name for the video title and the same product description for the video description.

I have 3 urls I am waiting to get reindexed to test out the change. Hopefully that fixes it, because as I said these are all unique pieces with detailed descriptions, great videos on each piece etc.