It seems that “content” is one of the most discussed topics in the SEO world this year. There’s good reason. Google wants to return results that offer a good “experience” for visitors. That means they are pushing for sites that “add value” to rank at the top. If your site is of a particularly exclusive niche than this is less likely of a potential issue. However, if you are a big retailer that uses product feeds that hundreds/thousands of other sites share, pay attention.
If you are passing on product feeds from your site to a marketplace (eBay, Amazon, Wayfair, etc.) or, even more important, if you are receiving feeds from a supplier than you may want to see if you can diversify your products text across each feed. In this video Matt Cutts of Google discusses how it is particularly important for product feeds to add value to separate them from any other site using the same products. He discusses the following items as variables that can be modified to diversify your product feed.
- unique product descriptions
- add product reviews, insight, research or analysis
- personalized videos about the product
If you warehouse your own inventory, more than likely you create your own product listings. Therefore, they should already be unique. However, if you are a wholesaler and get your products from an upstream provider there’s a good chance that the product descriptions you paste onto your site were copied and pasted by many others too. This is where you are most likely to run into penalties from duplicate or “thin content.”