The Web Promo folks had an excellent Q&A on duplicate content with Google’s John Mueller and Andrey Lipattsev and SEOs including Ammon Johns, Bill Slawski, Eric Enge and Jennifer Slegg. I recommend you watch the whole thing but in that video, Andrey Lipattsev from Google said that you won’t beat out your competitors by simply rewriting your product descriptions.

He said, “you are not going to solve it [i.e. ranking higher than your e-commerce competitors for a product] by rewriting your descriptions.” “That is another thing that people need to understand,” he added.

He went on to explain webmasters are thinking about the wrong thing when it comes to these issues. They should think more about how can they be way better than their competitors, not how they can rewrite product descriptions.

He said:

Glenn Gabe summed it up nicely in this tweet:

He said this at the 16:43 mark into the video. Here is the video embed:

Overall, it is worth watching the whole Q&A. But I like the points Glenn pulled out, here they are:

Forum discussion at a href=”href=”https://thisforall.net/glenngabe/status/743758539034767361″>Twitter.