When the Google Panda update was released many e-commerce websites suffered from falling visitor numbers and therefore sales. This was because of the thin content on their website. Most only had a photograph of the product, a price and a "buy me now" button. If there was any product description this would be a few sentences just copied from the manufacture's website. This made the shop's website fail to comply with two of Google's new rules; duplicate and thin content. Okay so you now know that to get your page a chance of being listed higher than your competitors one of the most important things is to have a good quality rich text page for each of your products. The problem then comes if you have similar products. You cannot just copy and past the same optimized descriptive text on each page. You would then have the same duplicate content on each page which would damage your search engine result page position.

On my fly fishing e-commerce website I have the problem of selling a number of similar products where the main difference is color. Okay these are fishing flies and this subject matter may not interest you but it could easily be washing machines, coffee makers, dresses, a make of car. In the situation shown in the image above I am selling nine different imitation grass hopper fishing flies. That means I have to write nine different 500 word product description articles on grass hopper fly patterns. There is only so much you can say about grass hoppers.

These new Google rules on content are tough. To succeed you have to find the time to write good unique content for each page. It can be very very hard to come up with ideas about what to write. I had to come up with nine pages of different content on the subject of grass hopper fishing flies. The text on these two example pages is completely different. I use a keyword research tools to help find out what people are searching for based around each product. For example "how do I fish a hopper fly?" or "what fishing line works best with a Hopper?". I then supply them with the answer.

One of the hardest things you do when constructing a website in a post-Panda world is writing content. If you do not have the skills or time to do it then you are going to have to employ someone to help you. There are a number of companies set up to provide a copy writing service. Many of them are staffed with journalists or other professional writers. If you cannot afford their page rates then why not go down to your local school gates and speak with some of the mums. Many of them would love the chance to earn some extra money, working from home, whilst their children are at school. Many of them have had high powered jobs and are very IT literate. If you live near a college or university see if there are any English or Journalist students that want to some extra money. You could also tempt them with the offer of supplying them a reference for their CV. "Copy writing for a commercial website" will look impressive to a potential employer.

So what happens if you have to have a legal disclaimer at the bottom of every page? This would be duplicate content? Does Google look unfavorably at these types of pages. Matt Cutts, from Google said "No". The Google search engine algorithm gets upset if the majority of the website is duplicate content. A few lines of legal disclaimer will not effect your page's SERP position. The same goes for using famous quotations