Wondering if using manufacturer-provided copy will cause duplicate content issues for your site?

Manufacturers often provide copy about their products so that retailers can use it to describe those products to potential buyers. Although this copy may be useful to people who arrive at a retail website, manufacturer-created copy causes multiple duplicate content issues from a search engine optimization standpoint.

You may be asking: why should I care if duplicate content issues cause problems for the search engine spiders?

Take a look at search engines from a search engine company’s perspective (Google, Yahoo, Bing and so forth). Each of the search engines want online searchers to choose to use their services, right? To get this to happen, a search engine focuses on providing the best results for each search query; to quote the most successful of the search engine companies about one of the ways that they accomplish this: “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information.”

To accomplish the goal of providing searchers with distinct information, search engine spiders may not index all pages that appear to have duplicate content – and, when a page is not indexed, it cannot be returned in response to a relevant query being typed into a search box.

In other words, un-indexed pages cannot receive ANY of the traffic generated by people using search engines to find products and services – and that’s a big problem for any company, including yours.

Here, in more detail, is why manufacturer-created copy can cause duplicate content issues for websites.

Descriptions created by manufacturers:

• Tend to be short; search engine spiders typically need at least 150 words of original copy to “get” what a page is about.
• Tend to be similar – or sometimes even identical – to other descriptions within a site; when this happens, search engine spiders may not index all of the product pages.
• Tend to be found on multiple websites; it is therefore likely that only some of the sites using this duplicate content will appear in the search engine results pages in response to relevant queries. Your competitor’s site may be presented in the search results, instead of yours.

Fortunately, The Search Guru provides SEO copywriting tips to combat the problems associated with manufacturer-generated copy.

Our SEO copywriting tips include:

• Prioritize the importance of your pages; this is especially important on a larger site. Top priority pages may include:
  - Landing pages for types of products and/or services
  - Pages featuring products and/or services with larger profit margins
  - Pages featuring products and/or services that form the core of your current sales strategy

• Create original content for as many of your pages as possible, in the order of their importance.
• Optimize the content to help the search engine spiders understand the theme of a page/site, so that YOUR pages can effectively be returned in response to relevant search queries.

Continue to watch The Search Guru blog for more SEO copywriting tips and much more.