Every reseller has the same product descriptions. Does that stop you ranking?

It stops you ranking for the product name, and it stops nothing else. There is no penalty. One page is chosen to represent duplicated text and the others are filtered from that one result, which is why the answer is to rewrite thirty products rather than four thousand.

It costs you the product name and nothing else

It stops you ranking for the product name, and it does not stop you ranking for everything else. There is no penalty involved. What happens is narrower and more manageable than the word "duplicate" suggests.

Understanding the difference decides where you spend effort, because the instinctive response, rewriting thousands of descriptions, is both impossible and mostly pointless.

What actually happens

Every reseller carrying a supplier's catalogue publishes the same product text, because it arrives in the feed that way. When somebody searches that exact product name, a search engine has many near-identical pages to choose from.

It picks one and filters the rest out of that result. Not because the others did anything wrong, but because showing ten copies of the same paragraph is a poor result for the person searching.

The page it picks is usually the one with the strongest signals behind it: an established domain, more links, more history. On a product name alone, a new reseller site is rarely that page.

So the supplier's own text will not win you the supplier's own product names. That is a small slice of what people search for.

What Google says about duplicate content

Google's own guidance is more relaxed than the folklore around it, and worth reading rather than taking second hand.

It distinguishes between duplication that exists to manipulate results and duplication that is a normal consequence of how the web works. Syndicated supplier descriptions on reseller sites are the second kind: unavoidable, unremarkable, and not treated as an offence.

What the documentation describes is selection rather than punishment. Where several pages carry the same content, one is chosen to represent it, and the others are not shown for that query. The rest of your site is unaffected.

That distinction matters because the fear people carry is that duplicate descriptions will damage the whole website. They will not.

Why this is not a penalty

Concretely, here is what is and is not happening to your site.

• Your other pages are not demoted because your product pages duplicate a supplier feed.
• Your domain is not marked down.
• Your category pages compete normally.
• Anything you write yourself competes normally.

The one thing you lose is a fight you were never going to win: outranking established sites on a product name using text you did not write.

Where you are competing, and where you are not

The useful reframe is that product-name searches are not where your customers are.

A procurement officer needing 200 branded golf shirts does not search a supplier product code. She searches for the thing she needs, often with a place, a quantity or an occasion attached. Those searches are answered by category pages and by written pages, not by a product description.

Long specific searches are different again. Somebody searching a precise product name together with a colour, a size or a use is a narrower field, and a well-built product page can win that. Those visitors are also much closer to ordering.

So the split is roughly this. Broad product names: not your fight. Categories and occasions: very much your fight. Long specific searches: winnable, and worth the most per visit.

What to rewrite, and what to leave

The instinct is to rewrite everything. Resist it. Four thousand rewritten descriptions is a year of work that would mostly sit on pages nobody searches for.

Rewrite your best sellers. The twenty or thirty products that make up most of your orders. You know things about them a feed does not: how they wash, which colours actually move, what they suit, what customers ask before buying.

Rewrite the category pages properly. This is where the effort pays best. A category page with a few hundred words of real guidance beats a grid of products, and no supplier feed supplies it.

Add what only you know. Your lead times, your minimums, your branding methods, the jobs you have done. None of that is in the catalogue and none of your competitors can copy it truthfully.

Leave the long tail alone. The other three thousand nine hundred products are there so a customer can find and order them, not to win searches. That is a perfectly good reason for a page to exist.

How to rewrite one properly

Rewriting a product description is not a writing exercise. Most attempts fail because somebody paraphrases the supplier text, which produces a page that is different but no more useful.

What makes a rewritten description worth the effort is information the feed does not carry. Four questions produce most of it, and you can answer all four from experience.

• Who actually buys this, and for what? A soft-shell jacket bought for a mining site is a different page from the same jacket bought for a golf day.
• What do customers ask before they order it? Whether it runs small, whether the colour matches a brand, how it takes embroidery. Those questions arrive on the phone every week.
• What goes wrong with it? Which colours mark, which fabric is warm, which sizes run out first. Saying so builds more trust than praise does.
• What branding suits it? Position, method, and what a logo looks like on that fabric.

Answering those turns a description into something a competitor cannot copy without knowing your trade, which is the whole point. The supplier's paragraph tells a buyer what the product is. Yours tells them whether it is right for them.

What matters more than the descriptions

Three things affect whether a reseller catalogue site works, and none of them is the product text.

Whether it is on your own domain. A storefront on a supplier's site earns results for that supplier.

Whether prices are visible. A buyer comparing options will take a number from whoever gives one. A page that says "enquire" competes badly against a page that says what something costs.

Whether a customer can actually order. Being found is only useful if the visit can turn into a specified order rather than an email asking for a quote.

The duplicate description question is real, and it is smaller than the three things above. Resellers worry about it because it is easy to see, and neglect the others because they are not.

Questions we get asked about this

Will I be penalised for duplicate product descriptions?

No. Google distinguishes between duplication that is manipulative and duplication that is ordinary, and syndicated supplier descriptions are ordinary. The consequence is not a penalty, it is that one version tends to be shown and the others filtered out of that particular result.

Should I rewrite all four thousand descriptions?

No. It is not achievable for one business and most of it would be wasted, because most of the catalogue is never searched for by name. Rewrite the products you actually sell.

Does using the supplier images cause the same problem?

Images are a much smaller factor than text for this kind of search, and hosting them yourself has real costs. Original photography of a branded job you produced is worth far more than a re-hosted copy of a supplier shot.

If descriptions do not differentiate me, what does?

Your category pages, anything you write yourself, your prices being visible, and being able to take an order. Those are all under your control and none of them are affected by the supplier text.

Last updated 9 September 2026. Sources and limits.