The same description on several products

The symptom

Open three products from the same range and read them side by side. The text is identical, or identical apart from a colour name. It usually starts as a reasonable decision — the products really are the same object in four finishes — and then the range grows to forty.

The most common source is not laziness. It is a supplier feed: the same manufacturer paragraph imported into every store that carries the line, yours included.

What it costs

Duplicate text inside one store and duplicate text across stores fail differently, and most catalogues have both.

• Inside your store, the products compete with each other. Search engines pick one page from a set of near-identical ones and suppress the others. Which one they pick is not your decision, and it is often not the one you would have chosen.
• Across stores, you rank behind whoever published it first. A manufacturer description you share with thirty competitors cannot distinguish you from any of them.
• The customer gets no help choosing. If four pages say the same thing, the only remaining difference is price, which is the one comparison you would rather not be reduced to.

How to check it yourself

An exact-match query finds the worst of it in one pass:

wp db query "SELECT MD5(post_content) AS odcisk, COUNT(*) AS n, \
  GROUP_CONCAT(post_title SEPARATOR ' | ') AS produkty \
  FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'product' AND post_status = 'publish' \
  AND CHAR_LENGTH(post_content) > 200 \
  GROUP BY odcisk HAVING n > 1 ORDER BY n DESC"

Replace wp_ with your table prefix. The length filter keeps one-line placeholders out of the result — those are a different finding.

This catches exact duplicates only. Descriptions that differ by a single colour name will not group together here, which is why the manual version of this check is weaker than it looks.

How to fix it

You do not need forty unique essays. You need each page to answer one question the others do not.

1. Start with the products that get traffic. A duplicate description on a page nobody visits costs nothing today.
2. Add the specific before the general. Dimensions, weight, material, what is in the box, what it does not fit. Two or three concrete lines per product outperform a rewritten paragraph.
3. Keep the shared text, but move it. A range description belongs on the category page, where it is not competing with itself.
4. For variations, use variations. Four colours of one product should usually be one product with an attribute, not four products with one description.

When it is a false positive

This is a heuristic, and there are honest reasons for identical text:

• Regulatory or safety wording that must be reproduced exactly.
• Genuine variants sold as separate products for stock or logistics reasons, where the description is the same because the object is the same.
• Very short catalogues where the shared paragraph is a deliberate house style.
• Products excluded from search engines, where the ranking argument does not apply.

How Merchlint finds it

Merchlint hashes the normalised description of every published product — whitespace collapsed, markup stripped, case ignored — and groups by the hash. It also runs a similarity pass over the groups it does not find, so descriptions differing only by a colour or a size still land together. Descriptions under two hundred characters are excluded and reported by the short-description check instead.

Each finding lists the products sharing the text, ordered by how much traffic each one gets, so the rewrite starts where it pays.

Confidence: H — heuristic. The identical text is a fact; whether it should be identical is a judgement about your catalogue that Merchlint cannot make for you.

This check ships in the Pro add-on.