How can I make the pages on my site unique?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from India. The question is, we have an e-commerce site, around 1,000 products and pages on that site. So how can we create unique meta details for those pages? OK. Let me give a little bit of tough love to you, right? The question should not be, I have n pages. How can I make them unique? The question is, how many pages can I make that are high quality, that provide value to a user? If you can’t manage to have 1,000 pages and have something unique, something different than just an affiliate feed or whatever on each page of that site, and why should your 1,000 pages– which are, again, maybe just rewarmed content of an affiliate feed– rank compared to someone else’s 1,000 pages of that same affiliate content? So I understand what you’re asking, but I think I would ask yourself, what makes your site unique? What is the value-add? What’s the compelling proposition that makes people want to go visit your e-commerce site? If you can’t have unique content, if you can’t come up with some unique angle or reason, even if it’s a gimmick, something that makes it fun, something that makes it better, easier for people, that makes them like your site, then that’s a really tough proposition. And so I wouldn’t set yourself a goal of having 1,000 pages, and then how can I add a little bit of value to each one. It sometimes is better to think about, OK, how much value can I add? And that determines the number of pages on my site, rather than the other way around. So that might sound a little bit harsh. But on the other hand, if everybody on the entire internet all wanted to have a 1,000-page site and weren’t able to come up with unique content or some other way or differentiating factor for their website, you’re only left with a lot of pages which are not that differentiated and not that high-quality and not that unique. And that’s not good for the web. It’s not good for the ecosystem of the web. It’s not good for users of the web who are just trying to find good stuff and don’t necessarily want to find a copy of the same content. They want to find, you know, something with unique value-add. So that might sound a little bit harsh, but give it some thought. Because we do see a lot of people who are like, OK, I can make this many sites. Now how do I make them useful? And sometimes by the time you reach that point, where you have n number of sites, and you’re trying to make them useful, you’ve already made some, in my opinion, errors in how you’re trying to think about how to create your site. So just some food for thought, whenever you’re thinking about it.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: