For several years now, Google have been advising webmasters to create valuable, original and unique content. One place where this often does not happen is in product descriptions for affiliate sites, which are often copied and pasted from the original manufacturer's website.
Starting from November 2021, it's even more likely that affiliate sites with duplicate content will find their pages disappear from Google's search results - not just penalised in terms of ranking in the results, but actually removed completely from Google Search and other Google websites.
This is as a consequence of the November 2021 Google Spam Update, announced on Twitter via Google's SearchLiaison account on November 3rd:
As part of our regular work to improve results, we've released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search: https://t.co/jK3ArQmTqT
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 3, 2021
So what do Google's Best Practices for Search have to say about websites that participate in affiliate schemes and reproduce the product descriptions supplied by the original manufacturer?
Affiliate Programs Without Added Value
Google's Webmaster Guidelines advise webmasters to write content for a human audience first, and not primarily for search engine performance. This in itself is not at odds with good SEO practice, which still allows content to be optimised for improved search rankings, provided that the content is of value to human readers.
However, the penalty for failing to meet Google's Quality Guidelines is severe, with the potential threat of vanishing from the search results across Google Search and its partner sites. For affiliate ecommerce sites, that is a punishing price to pay for reusing product descriptions provided by the manufacturer.
"We strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the Quality guidelines, which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action.
"If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites."
- Google Webmaster Guidelines, November 2021
Under a bullet point list of specific guidelines, Google warns against "participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value" and links to this 'Advanced SEO' guide on the issue. This suggests a variety of solutions, including adding original product reviews, comparison pieces (e.g. gift guides, buyer's guides etc) and other unique, relevant content.
Crucially, your content should align with the product categories you sell. Google gives the example of a website or blog about hiking, and says that the site is likely to rank better and achieve more sales by affiliating with a publisher of books about hiking, rather than with a general office supplies affiliate program.
How to Generate Unique Product Descriptions
The best way to generate unique product descriptions for affiliate sites is to write them (or hire a freelance writer for product descriptions that match your affiliate scheme, add value and engagement, and also factor in your current SEO key words and phrases).
While AI systems are increasingly sophisticated, we are still not quite at a place where you can automatically generate unique product descriptions by 'spinning' the original manufacturer's descriptions using some kind of automated thesaurus bot. The best 'thesaurus bot' is still a human being.
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A good freelance writer can work through a large number of product descriptions, to help populate your affiliate ecommerce site as quickly as possible - especially if you have an existing website full of scraped product descriptions, and want to act quickly to avoid a potential Google penalty.
Your unique product descriptions can of course use the original manufacturer's descriptions as their source material. Certain characteristics of your products such as size, colour, materials used, and so on, are fixed and should be factored into your new product descriptions, but with original, unique wording.
How to Recover From a Google Spam Penalty
If Google has flagged your website as potential spam, due to duplicate product descriptions or any other reason, you may see a 'Manual Actions' report in your Google Search Console data. This should help you to identify the content on your website that needs to be improved, either by making it unique, or by adding to it with original, compelling content.You should work with an experienced writer to create original content that is your own, and which will meet the Quality Guidelines mentioned above. Make sure the new content is in place on the public-facing version of your website, with the old duplicate content removed, and you're ready to resubmit your site to Google.
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The final step is to submit a Reconsideration Request to Google, which will trigger them to take another look at your website and content and, if they think you have done what is necessary to raise the standard of your content, then you should soon see your pages crawled, indexed and ranked all over again.
Why You Should Not Wait
Affiliate ecommerce via dropshipping or just by using the manufacturer's product information is a competitive climate, and vanishing from the search results would be catastrophic for many webmasters.
Don't wait for your website to disappear from the search results before tackling duplicate content or 'thin' content on your existing pages, or you could be left facing a significant financial loss.
Hire a freelance writer today to write unique product descriptions for your affiliate sites and, as Google roll out the November 2021 Spam Update around the world, you can rest assured that you have done everything possible to preserve your search rankings and ultimately, to protect your business's bottom line.
