Is Duplicate Web Content Okay?

We all know that duplicate content on different websites is bad news. If you are the one who copied it, you're going to be penalised. But what about duplicate content on different pages of your own website? Is that something you should be avoiding too? Let me share with you what Google has to say on this issue.

What Are Category and Product Pages?

A category page is where all your product listings live. There's the name or title of each product together with a short blurb about the product. Website visitors use your category page to find specific products and click through to their product page.

A product page is a page which lists only one product. This is where your product description lives and where people can put your product into their shopping cart.

Problems occur when website owners use the same content from their product descriptions in their category blurbs. But is this a problem? Google's John Mueller says:

“What generally happens in a case like that is we find the same text snippet on multiple pages on your website and that’s perfectly fine… What will however happen is when someone is searching for something just in that text snippet then all of these different pages are kind of competing against each other in the search results and will try to pick one of these pages to show and try to figure out which one is their most relevant…

So that could be that maybe your category pages see more traffic but that would kind of come at the cost of your product detail pages seeing less traffic."

Well, there's your problem. It's with people finding the right information on your site, not with Google. This means you should be using unique content for both category and product pages in order to not compete with yourself.

If you need some help creating category blurbs or product descriptions, call me!