Similar Product Pages & Google

[titaneye]

I have an ecommerce website with thousands of products, each product having it's own page. The product descriptions only vary page to page by several words, the product photos change [x5], sku numbers change, and product titles change. The meta tags titles, descriptions, and keywords, again only vary by a few words page to page. There are some small changes to the navigation as well. To sum it up, most of my products are very similar. Does anyone else have any experience dealing with a similar type of ecommerce website, and are there any duplicate contents penalties I should expect from Google because my product pages are similar, or should I expect that Google will not index all of these pages at all?

[tigger]

I've been thinking about this and as I'm going to be starting a site soon with a similar type problem.

What about rather than trying to optimise every page for a product you build your main subpage lets say call it Blue-widgets then your store pages from that page blue-widgets-001.html but rather than optimising them for blue-widgets-001 you call the page something like 001 and do your best to not push the main keyword for that page but use that page as a good anchor link back to the main blue-widgets page?

This way if the site has say 20 main product pages but another 100 or so sub products from each main keyword you will be strengthening the main products

As in my case I will have 10 main keywords with 50 odd pages for each keyword so in theory have 50 good anchors pointing to each of the 10 main pages

I hope I've explained myself well here still trying to work it out now