We already wrote an article about duplicate content.
However, we thought it would be important to talk about the excerpt and share our observations. We found that Googlebot crawled and indexed category pages very well so that category pages with excerpt could be returned in a Google search result rather than pages themselves.
Meanwhile, from a business point of view, it is better when a visitor gets closer to a click where there will be a conversion. It is better when a visitor lands on a page than a category page because the page usually contains affiliate links, advertisements, purchase buttons. Consequently, the page should get all the PageRank.
An Excerpt is a duplicate content of an article text whether we like it or not. If I compare the benefits and the disadvantages of adding excerpts, I think that excerpt have more disadvantages than benefits.
Disadvantages:
- Automatically generated excerpts are duplicate content
- Automatically generated excerpts compete with the keywords in the content of a page
- Automatically generated excerpts don’t help to higher conversions.
Benefits:
It vaguely adds a description to a title but in the vast majority of case, the reader can understand a subject by only reading the title of a