Beware Duplicate Content

One of the things that a good drop ship supplier should provide are product descriptions of their items.  Which is great.  Frankly a supplier who isn’t giving out product descriptions is risking some low sales.  Why?  Because it takes me some time to get new products up on my site.  Sometimes, a long time.  That’s a lot of information to organize, upload, etc.  And for me, thinking of clever product descriptions for each item is the most time consuming.  If I’ve got to write them all from scratch, well I just might pass.

Be careful what you use

It’s not all smooth sailing, however.  The problem with these descriptions are that they are offered to everyone.  So any number of sites could have exactly the same descriptions.  Which leads to duplicate content.  A web search for duplicate content will bring up all kinds of information.  But basically, search engines give weight to original content.  So, whenever more than one page on the internet has the same content (product description in our case) you run a serious risk of that page being ignored by the search engine results.  Of course, it’s tough to sell an item if the search engines don’t show it.

What’s a happy balance?

Personally I do use supplier descriptions, particularly at first.  When I add a new product line, it is important to me to get the product up and live on the store as quickly as possible.  As I said before, writing unique descriptions just takes too long.

However, I do go back later and make revisions where it make sense.  I won’t necessarily edit all of them, but popular and good selling items I will.  Writing original content is a great project for when sales are slow.

One Response to “Beware Duplicate Content”

1. More Thoughts About Content | Drop Ship Digest Says:
   December 13th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

   [...] Beware Duplicate Content [...]

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