How to fix it
- Find the largest duplicate groups first. A handful of groups usually accounts for most of the affected products.
- For colourway splits, keep the shared paragraph but add two or three sentences that only apply to that variant.
- For supplier copy, rewrite around what the product measurably is rather than what it is good for.
Why an agent cares
Duplicate descriptions come from two places: a dropship import that applied one supplier blurb to a whole category, or a colourway split where the same shoe in nine colours became nine products with one description.
Both are read the same way. If forty products share a body of copy, none of those forty says anything specific enough to be retrieved for a specific question, and the whole group competes against itself.
There is a second cost. Large-scale duplicate copy is one of the patterns Google Merchant Center weighs when deciding whether a store is misrepresenting itself, and a misrepresentation suspension takes the entire Shopping channel down at once.
Check your own store
This check runs as part of a full audit, alongside 18 others. Nothing to install.
Other substance checks
The description describes a different productWhen the body copy never mentions the item in the title, the listing is either mis-imported or wrong, and both are treated as misrepresentation.Descriptions with no measurable specificationsAdjectives cannot be compared. Numbers can. Copy with no figures gives an agent nothing to filter or rank on.Keyword-stuffed product titlesA title built for 2015 search engines cannot be parsed into brand, product and variant by anything reading it today.Descriptions too short to evaluateUnder about forty words there is not enough text to establish what the product is, let alone why it is the right one.