In Your Own Words, Please!
If you have a retail site, chances are that the various manufacturers whose wares you sell will provide you with nice, well-written descriptions of their products. Using these to build a site is about as easy as running a copying machine. And it produces results that are about as valuable as a photocopy.
      If you play Me Too with your site's copy, you assure yourself of a position near the bottom of search results. Only the first good site out there is going to get decent page rank for duplicate content. This is because Google and a number of the other search engines now run duplicate content filters. They put these in place because adult webmasters were trying to grab 10 pages worth of results for their site by registering 100 domain names and pointing them all to the same site. The idea was, no matter which one you click, you end up on their site.
      Since this waters down the value of Google's search results, the search engine engineers were quick to introduce countermeasures. They want to deliver unique content to their "customers". They want to know that if you visit their first search result and don't find what you are looking for, the second result and the next 25 in order are not going to be just more of the same. So they punish duplicate content. First one in with a good site wins and stays on top. All the copycats sink hopelessly out of site in search.

Copy That!
If you are up to the task, write your copy yourself. What does "up to it" mean? Look at some professional ad copy in a magazine. It's crisp, to-the-point and well written. It may describe the product, but it invariably does more. It appeals to the emotional strings that cause people to buy the given product. It sells the sizzle, not just the steak. If you can't write like that, don't despair. Lots of published authors fail miserably at ad copy writing. It's a specialty. If you need to, hire experts to get the job done for you, but by whatever means necessary, come up with unique, top-notch content for your site.

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