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

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

Google's Matt Cutts answers:

Summary of the answer:

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Question	Views
Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site?	562
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
There seems to be little impact on human visitors where in the site's structure a given page is, so: Is it better to keep key content pages close to root, or have them deep within a topical funnel-structure, e.g. food/fast-food/burgers/hamburgers.php	593
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?	295
Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs and other dynamic sites?	674
An SEO suggested that I take all the content on my Twitter page and auto-feed it into a section on my website. Will this really help my site's PageRank?	564
I have a server-side script that automatically redirects visitors to a mobile version of a site if they are using a mobile browser. My question is: What are some things to watch out for (if any) when serving different content based on the visitor?	418
What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings e.g. if I wanted to target a new phrase and wanted to check the progress of its ranking - what is the best way to check it?	564
Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites?	578

Question

Views

Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site?

562

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

There seems to be little impact on human visitors where in the site's structure a given page is, so: Is it better to keep key content pages close to root, or have them deep within a topical funnel-structure, e.g. food/fast-food/burgers/hamburgers.php

593

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?

295