Penalized for short descriptions?

[Rallen]

Hey there.

I have recently started working on an existing Magento webshop with some 2.000 products.
Most of these products have really short descriptions, and these descriptions are placed as short description, because this section is more visible in the used theme than the main description.

However, the theme is also displaying short descriptions for each products on the different category pages, search results etc. Could this count as duplicate content and get us punished by search engines, because the same short descriptions can be found on multiple pages?

Thanks!

[jane]

Descriptions of products should be enough to know it properties and short descriptions are not useful for a website and its products. Each product should have mentioned in some words to differentiate it from other product.

[rajan]

Google will not penalize a website for short description. But short description and title tag will affect the quality of your website and this will affect your ranking in Google and other SERP. so its better to place an unique and descriptive title and description tag for your website.

[Akash Varma]

Use product category name in your description for each pages so that it will become unique. Google will never penalize for short description, but for using same short description on several pages will do so.

[yashepe]

Hi,
The short description is not an issue with any search engine, but yes duplication of the content is weird thing. If you can make some changes in the descriptions across the website, then probably it will be the good idea to have.

thanks