Unique Content. How Many Times Must it be Said?
A forum topic the other day brought something to my attention something that I did not realize was so pervasive. We all know that if you sell a Garmin GPS Device, you are going to have a set description for it - probably provided by the manufacturer. The only difference will be - where does it appear on the page and what font are you using. The question is - is this spam?
In Google’s eyes, I’m pretty positive the answer is “yes”. In another sense, I want to make the point that simply using manufacturer description is a terrible way to build your new webstore.
Let’s start with point 2. I went to shopping.com, and searched for a Garmin product. I’m not in this field, I don’t sell these products, I just know that a product most likely to have the generic manufacturer description is an electronic device. (Obvious reasons).
So I come up to this page. As of this post, 48 stores sell this same product. Seems like a good start. Let’s take a little bit of the product description.
The StreetPilot c-series GPS navigators feature a simple touchscreen interface
And search Google, Yahoo, and MSN and see how many sites have that exact phrase on it. We’ll search using quotes. Google shows 629, Yahoo shows 544, MSN shows 318. Again, as of this writing. So, if you are new to selling this particular product, you are up against -at least- 300 other websites with this same description. And they were here first. You are immediately in competition with homedepot.com, shopping.com, ebay.com etc for this product with absolutely no unique reason why a shopper could come to you first. Price? Hah! You’d do much better for yourself to completely rewrite this product description to be more tailored to your site. It can take a little bit of time and a good writer who knows what they are doing, but it is worth it in the long run. Make yourself unique.
On this same topic, I noticed that many splogs (spam blogs) also use these manufacturer descriptions for their spam content. Which will lead me to my next point.
Is this spam? I define spam as useless content that is not unique and appears all over the internet. Article submission is spam. Copying DMOZ is spam. Reusing Google SERPs to make a scraper site; that’s spam. So, using manufacturer descriptions? Spam. That’s a little gray for me and I’ll let Google/MSN/Yahoo decide for sure; but, if you were a budding ecommerce store, do you want to play the game? Let’s say Google decides one day that these mass produced, easily available descriptions are spam. You’re done. If you prepare ahead and rewrite your stuff now, you’ll be ahead of the game - which is where you want to be. Stay out of any future crossfire.
Play it safe now; safe in the future.
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Hon Hon on March 2nd, 2007
Spam is very popular in the Philippines.
They have a franchise which sells Spam Burgers.