Hi all

Firstly, to let you know. I posted this at Google Webmaster help forum around 8 hours ago but nobody has replied. So I am assuming nobody there knows the answer>

My website is an x-cart bookshop.

I currently have category pages (and home page) which show title, picture and short description for each book in the shop.

I have seen a possible new skin template. This does not give short descriptions, so you have to click through to the book's item page to see the description.

My question: some of my item pages (from a long time ago, there are 6000 in total) have the same short description on the category page as the long description on the page you click through to from the category page. This is because I couldn't think of my own text of a reasonable length (not being able to read all the books).

The benefit I see from this new template is that it removes what (I assume) Google etc may regard as duplicate content. But the disadvantage is that there would be no description on the category pages - just titles, picture and price. You'd click on the titles to get to the main page. My problem with this is I thought Google etc doesn't like pages that are largely pictures with little text - and this is a template site anyway (x-cart), so large elements of each page look identical already..e.g. navigation, add to cart...

Which is likely to be better for crawling and ranking of books - the current website, or moving to the new template?

Any opinions gratefully received.

Regards

Dilip

[edited by: phranque at 10:36 pm (utc) on Mar 25, 2010]
[edit reason] URLs [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]