I'm running an affiliate site which sells some goods and every item has a description (about 5kb long) which is hosted on a main site. I'm thinking of moving the descriptions to my site but in doubt whether it makes sense from Google's point of view? Will it impact my positions since my site will have big amount of the same text as some other site has? (overall amount of goods descriptions is about 3MB in a plain text and I'm not feeling ready to rewrite them)
Certainly don't use duplicate content! Rewrite it thoroughly instead, or write fresh content from scratch.
Rewriting it will be the best idea as tons of other sites will also have the same content. And, Google seems not to like affiliate links. It's better to mask them and use the nofollow tag.
I already masked those links with nofollow, I did it as soon as I launched the site. I understand that rewriting is the best option, but as I mentioned in the start message, I don't have enough time right now to rewrite 3 megabytes of text and I haven't found a good person to do this for me. I set this as task for the future, but this is not a No.1 in my list. Let me narrow the question - if I just move the content to my site instead of linking to parent site - will it negatively impact my positions in Google/Yahoo/whatever? What's your opinion on this?
Here is my opinion: I have done this many times, not with affiliated products but with xml feeds from large sites. What I have noticed is that Google may choose to index your content over the place the it originates on. -This can happen if your site becomes a stronger authority in a particular field. -The content is orginally on a site that targets a region such as co.uk and your target is com.au, chances are you will lead the way in that country as it wont be looked at as duplicate data for that region. -Mixing different products together so that it appers different to the original site can also help. -Mix some of your own scripted content on the same page. Such as "this product xxxxx is a great product and we always have lots of xxx in stock etc.." Google is smart to detect some of this but it adds to the page weight and keywords on teh page for that product. -Some dup content is better than no content for google to crawl through. Google needs content to analyse the page and get an accurate idea of what its about so it can be index correctly. Last of all, Google can change anything at any time so I will not say that your listings may or may not go up or down as a result. But in my experience its been positive. Hope that helps