Duplicate Content due to database usage! Any Solution??

[Amod Oke]

Hi guys,

Without wating time, here's the situation:

SITUATION:
1) I am upgrading my ecommerce jewelry site which until now had around 400-500sku's, which would be increasing above 1000 now.

2) Till now, the 'product pages' had typical looonnng url's with $, %, and other symbols. Due to which, search engine's didnt index them, obviosuly.

3) But now, i am cleaning the urls so the actual product url would be like "category/some-product-1/" which should get indexed.


ISSUES:
1) Since, most of the products will have similar content on their page EXCEPT for their product description, how bad is this from seo perspective?

2) I think around 60-80% text will be similar (for e.g. shipping info, product faq, common related info)


MY THOUGHTS:
1) Any work around to this problem? Also, will a penalty be imposed on the entire site, or just the similar looking pages?

2) One thing i was considering was, instead of text info, put most the common text as a low-sized gif image, so technically SE's will only see the "image" repeated, and not bring up red flags.

3) The reason i am trying to get these pages indexed is because the product descriptions have a huge variety of various keywords which i think would benefit long term wise.

So, what say people?

Thanks in advance,
Amod

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Google will pick what it thinks is most important. If the Googlebot detects a lot of duplicate content it may choose to ignore the additional content and stop the crawl.

This happens all the time. So your best bet it simply to TELL GOOGLE WHAT IS IMPORTANT... use meta tags to tell them what to index and what not to index.

If you look at something simple like WordPress most the SEO Plugins allow you to do this very easily However if you have a custom CMS you may want to talk to the developer and see if they can offer a simple solution for you.

[Amod Oke]

First of all, thanks for the response...

One thing i was considering was, instead of text info, put most the common text as a low-sized gif image, so technically SE's will only see the "image" repeated, and not bring up red flags.

Will this help? Because technically, most of the duplicated content will go in an image, which will be repeated on the pages. (I dont think that 1 or 2 images repeated on pages count as "duplicate content", does it?)

So the actual product descriptions will differ and hopefully google should index the pages (as long as they have SE friendly urls!)

What do you say to this strategy?
And lastly, even if G thinks that some content is being duplicated, will it PENALIZE THE ENTIRE SITE? Or just the "duplicated pages"?

I mean i dont want to bite more than i can chew!

Regards,
Amod

[Thomas De]

I would set nofollow-links to the shipping details (opening in a new smaller window) instead of placing images, but you won´t get problems with google for having the same images on all your sites.