Product Descriptions
Why Manufacturer Product Descriptions Hurt Your Rankings
Using the supplier's copy is free and fast, and it is why your product pages are invisible.
Almost every retailer starts with the manufacturer's copy. It arrives with the product feed, it is accurate, and writing your own for four hundred items is a large job. The problem is that every other retailer selling that product did exactly the same thing.
What Google Sees
When the same paragraph appears on a hundred product pages across a hundred domains, a search engine has to choose which one to show. It will not show all of them, and the tie-break goes to whichever site it already trusts most.
For a small or mid-sized retailer competing with the manufacturer and with the largest marketplaces, that is a contest you lose by default. Not because the page is bad, but because it offers nothing the others do not already have.
Your page is not being penalised. It is being filtered out as a duplicate, which produces the same result and is harder to notice.
Why Spinning It Does Not Work
The obvious shortcut is to reword the supplied text — swap synonyms, reorder sentences, change the opening. It is quick and it can be automated.
It also produces copy that reads slightly wrong, adds nothing a buyer did not already have, and remains recognisably the same content. You take on the cost of rewriting without gaining the benefit of being different.
Automated rewriting at catalogue scale is the version of this that causes real damage. It leaves a site full of near-identical pages, which is exactly the pattern search engines look for.
What Actually Differentiates
The advantage a retailer has over a manufacturer is that they see how the product performs in the field. That knowledge is what nobody else can copy.
- Who it suits: The manufacturer describes the product; you know which customers it is right and wrong for.
- Real objections: The questions that come in before purchase, answered in the copy rather than by email.
- Returns knowledge: The reasons people send it back tell you exactly what the description failed to make clear.
- Comparison: How it differs from the other two products on your own shelf that a buyer is weighing it against.
- Practical detail: Assembly time, what else is needed, what it does not include — the things a spec sheet omits.
Where to Start When You Cannot Do Everything
Rewriting a whole catalogue at once is rarely necessary or affordable. Sort by revenue and rewrite downward.
- Take your best-selling twenty products and rewrite those first.
- Add the products getting search impressions but no sales, which are the ones closest to working.
- Set a rule that anything new gets original copy from the day it is listed.
- Work through the rest by margin rather than alphabetically.
Where a catalogue is too large to handle internally, that is the job our product description writing service exists for.