Will including generic product descriptions reduce the significance of my unique content?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Here’s a wise question from Phil in Fillmore, Indiana. “On a web retail site, unique item descriptions are ideal for both users and Googlebot, compared to generic manufacturer descriptions. Some users prefer to see generic descriptions, too. Will including both reduce significance of the unique content? Well, it can. I’ve yet to really run across a user who really prefers to see the generic descriptions. Whenever someone gets a little snippet of text then they see that the same snippet of text occurs on a thousand other websites. Yeah, they do seem to ask themselves, “Well, why does your website deserve to rank when all the other thousand websites have the exact same content?” And even if you have a little bit of unique content having the exact same affiliate or sometimes even cookie cutter feed kind of–to users can make your site look a little bit worse. So if you’ve gone to the trouble to have unique item descriptions and the value add in terms of all the different descriptions you’re doing that are good about these items, I would probably leave off the generic descriptions if you can. I would probably say, “Go ahead and go with the stuff that you’ve taken the time to vet and to make sure that it is, you know, something that you’ve written just for your site,” because then users will see that you are not just a run of the mill site, you didn’t just set your site up and, you know, two days and take a whole bunch of affiliate data and snap it up there and you’re going to move on to the next site after that. So I think there’s a lot of value if you’re willing to put in the time on having those sorts of unique descriptions. And I think it can be really good if you’re willing to put in the work.

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

Original video: