(Entry was posted by Chris Greene on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 03/05/2020).

Duplicate content on descriptio

Hey we have found about 20% of our product pages have descriptions which are duplicate content, so the content was taken elsewhere. No organic rankings for these posts. Would next best step be to add a noindex tag?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Michael Martinez: I see no reason to do that from what you wrote. Do people use the pages?
Chris Greene: Yes some people can navigate to these product pages within the site navigation but my thinking is having these product pages indexed by Google with their duplicate content will hurt the overall SEO of the site?
Michael Martinez: Chris Greene It takes a lot of duplicate content to have a negative impact on a site`s relationship with a search engine.

I don`t think there is a specific threshold but if you`re talking about a relatively small percentage of the site`s content it`s most likely not a problem. (I have no opinion on whether 20% is "relatively small".)

Normally when dealing with duplicate meta descriptions I advise people to delete them and let the search engines extract descriptive text snippets from on-page content. That gives the site publishers time to write unique meta descriptions at their own pace.