Official Google answer: Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites?

Question:

Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites? It does happen for many branded products.

Google's Matt Cutts answers:

Summary of the answer:

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Question

Views

Does Google see automatically generated content as a bad thing (i.e. spam)?

713

Should a "Sale Page" be in a robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content?

477

What are your opinions on optimizing an e-commerce website where the main pages/products may not necessarily be rich content?

524

Organic link building, according to me is one of the most difficult tasks for SEOs of SMEs. Can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?

2,233

A question to non-intended duplicate content: If an online shop can be reached through several TLDs (like .de, .at, .ch) and the only difference is the currency (and necessarily the checkout process) does Google consider this duplicate content?

415