Duplicate content - will I be penalised?

HI Everyone,

I'm a bit concerned that ten of my products on my website have the same description. Will this get me penalised for duplicate content? Only the thing is the products are the same but for basic color differences, etc.

Many thanks,

Slooshy

Why combining it into a single product page that contains all information including color options?

You only have a single page of rich content that will minimize confusions for your visitors navigating and finding content in your site.

Write unique descriptions for them. Either you do it, or hire a writer to do it, that is the only way really. Lots of products on the web come with the same descriptions, which is a problem.

Although you asked if you would get penalised; you won't get penalised, your pages will just get filtered out of the search results by a stronger website with more link authority, so your pages will just be in the supplemental results which don't get shown any more. The way to get them out is to write unique content and get more quality links.

Hi,

I think you can write content & also you can differnsiate all your products with there feathers & types.

Also I think you can do something more then it.
- Compare all products


I hope you can understand it & if you have any question ask me.

Thanks & Regards,
Samir

Duplicate contents mean you've copied the content from other sites not that you've specified same description for different products....resultant your site would not be get good ranking in google... You may describe the features of different different products...

one thing's for sure, if you ever used a duplicate content, you'll be getting a hard time getting positive results on your site.

Duplicate content continues to come in for more concern than it actually warrants. Your average website tends to have it in abundance, whether it be due to canonical URL issues, dynamic URLs with re-ordered query string variables, e-commerce sites with similar products (as in this case), etc. Even Wikipedia suffers from it.

Almost always, the worst scenario is that you're not making the most efficient use of available link juice. It's very rare to find that Google has penalised it -- quite the opposite in fact: Google actively tries to help you out by determining the best URL to use when faced with two pages with the same content.

Sure, if you extensively scrape other sites, or build a site based on nothing but rehashed content you're going to struggle. I would hope, however, that anyone on here that's serious about their site isn't going to be attempting that anyway.

To the OP, as has already been suggested, the best option is probably to combine all the pages into one, with a drop-down list or similar with the product colours listed. It'll benefit you (less pages to maintain), Google (less pages to crawl), and the visitor (less pages to visit).

Of course, there's invariably a problem, and in your case it may be that the site's back end coding may have to be altered to do this (with an inherent cost associated). If it proves to be too costly to make this change at the moment, then don't get overly concerned as it won't result in a penalty.