Has anyone had to deal with creating descriptions across thousands of product pages? Besides doing them all by hand, anybody have a suggestion?
i usually update every page... yah it takes time but it help... should be unique depends on its page content...
If you product name is rather good you can create all descripion automatically For example, you have Fujitsu-siemens 120GB HDD 1.86GHz 15.4" Notebook You can create descripton 'Fujitsu-siemens notebook with 1.86GHz processor. Its hard disk is large, it has 120 GB of space and it is enough to save XXX mp3 songs or XXX DVD movies. It is standart 15.4" size and you can easily take it with you anywhere'.
It's not clear what you are dealing with and what you want. Give some examples of the items for which you want descriptions, and maybe we can find an answer for you. Also, are you talking about the Descriptions meta tag or full product descriptions?
What script are you using? Most have plugins or hacks that allows you to automatically fetch a snippet from the product description on your page and use it as your Meta Description. Otherwise i'd just copy & paste a few relevant lines from the page copy in to your description tag when you are doing the titles.