asher02 - 11:59 am on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

"For me as a searcher it is only logical that pages differing only in "red" and "blue" with several kByte of otherwise identical content (like links or other boiler plates) will not rank well in google."

I think you are so wrong.

I'm in the gift industry and in order to close a sale I need to show my customers the actual product with a very good picture.

So I have my category page with thumbnails of the products and have a unique page for each products.

In my industry a "hey I have this one also in red" does not work you have to show the customer the exact products they want to buy, so the other option is to upload all similar products to one page and end up with a 120k page that no one will wait for it to download.

other problem is similar products that have a small difference in design, so one will be a "dove widget" and the other one will be a "Jerusalem widget", both use the same materials same artist and just a different inner design so basically the difference in the description will be just one sentence about the different motif but the products are not the same.

I'll even go further, we offer Jewelry with the same motif but the design is different and we have over 30 of these. I'll give an example from my site,

product 1 description: "This pretty pendant is handcrafted from 925 sterling silver and opal stone. The opal is set into the middle of the silver to create the shape of a Magen David. This beautiful pendant makes an amazing gift for your friends and family. "

Product 2:"This attractive handcrafted Magen David pendant is made of opal stone and 925 sterling silver. The opal stone is fitted in the middle of this silver Magen David shaped pendant. This beautiful pendant makes an amazing gift for your friends and family.

These 2 products do not look the same at all, each one of them is unique and deserve a page of its own. However the description uses the same keywords. We changed it a bit to avoid duplicate filter not because it has to be this way.

The second products is now supplemental as well as many others from the same kind despite the fact that each one of them is a unique product.

I can go on & on but I guess you get the picture.

Now If it is just a duplicate filter then I don't mind, my concern is about duplicate penalty that affect the other portions of my site.