I am going over some product pages for an e-commerce site. My question is, within the product page, we have really good descriptions in the site content. I was thinking about copying all those good description and placing them as my meta description. Is this a goood idea? Is it considered duplicate content?
There's a lot of disagreement on the subject of duplicate content. I would say, that it would not kill you to do so, but it would be best to rewrite it, so it would be unique.
i would rewrite it and us something like dup free pro to give you a % original. You might even be able to use copyscape as it is used in a meta tag.
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include: * Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices * Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs * Printer-only versions of web pages If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content, there are a number of ways you can indicate your preferred URL to Google. (This is called "canonicalization".) However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results. Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
The best way is to rewrite it, it doesnt cost much and turns out to be equally good, the site owners from where you intend to copy them might take some legal action, there is a possibility
I don't think there's anything wrong with copying in the beginning. Then if your website starts performing well, consider changing all the copied content into your own words.
Candise, Thank you for your thorough explanation of duplicate content. What about for e-commerce websites? Just the description of the items. I have two websites where my clients are simply manufacturers reps. Therefore, the content on the product description is the same as what the manufacturing company offers. Is it possible to be dinged for duplicate content or that too? Thanks for your help. Michelle Dettlaff Techno Princess
It is a bad Idea to copy exactly the same text as either Metadata or any other article on your websites. You can either rewrite or paraphrase the same text, but never ever try to copy and paste the content.