I'm working with a site - let's say it's a third-party ecommerce site. The issue is that the site contains dup content in the subcategory and product pages. So, let's say that the site is selling shoes. And a subcategory page is sandals, containing a list of product descriptions. These descriptions are dup content to the actual products pages, which contain that exact description. Now, that's not a big deal for the second, third, and fourth pair of sandals on the subcategory page. But for the first pair of sandals on that subcategory page, it's an exact match, word-for-word, to the first paragraph of its product page. Also, if you sort by price, that pair of sandals is NOT the first on that page. So implementing a canonical tag on the product page to the subcategory sandals page would probably not be the best move. Unless I implement a canonical tag on all of those product pages, which just seems kind of silly to me- the entire page isn't dup content after all, it's various sections of the page that are duplicates of various other pages on the site.
I'm kind of hoping that the great and mighty Google is somewhat understanding of such dup content issues on ecommerce sites, since it's unavoidable - any thoughts? And if Google isn't understanding, how would I deal with something like this?
(Also, many of these product descriptions have been scraped from the original brand's website, but that's something that I'm changing ASAP.)
