Same item described 50 ways

[mhkatz]

My company sells widgets. Our widgets appeal to a variety of different professional markets. To make it easier for people in those various markets to search for our widget, we have set up about 50-60 items in our site (A Yahoo Store), which are really the same widget, but have an item name that would appeal to the various target markets. For example, we might have "lawyer's widget", "doctor's widget", "architect widget". Each item uses the same image and has the same pricing. There are some relatively minor variations in the descriptive text for each item to help target the description to the various markets.

Our site has a page which consists of a link to each item in the store. This is a page that is generated automatically by the Yahoo Store. We have a link from our home page to this item listing page so that the search engines can find these items.

Does this seem like something that would trigger some kind of spam filter at Google?

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes, that would be spam... it's called doorway pages. A bit more upscale than old school keyword stuffed doorways, but a doorway none-the-less.

[meannate]

You're gonna run into problems... as far as Google is concerned these "relatively minor variations" will appear as "relatively minor variations" for different search engines, or different search phrases, thus setting off a red flag for the spam man.

[Marcia]

This is exactly what gets me concerned about product catalog pages that, even though they may be for different products, they have a great deal of code and text that's common to the whole site. Sometimes there's extensive navigation that's carried throughout, and so little description and unique information for each product that it could easily look like they're all duplicates or doorways just because of the percentage that's identical.

It seems magnified with dynamic shopping cart pages, and I've been playing it safe by excluding the whole cart area with robots.txt I haven't been sure whether it's a valid concern, and it isn't done deliberately, it's just how the dynamic pages work.

[bcc1234]

It seems magnified with dynamic shopping cart pages, and I've been playing it safe by excluding the whole cart area with robots.txt I haven't been sure whether it's a valid concern, and it isn't done deliberately, it's just how the dynamic pages work.

Just got about 950 catalog pages crawled. 99% of the html is identical.
I'll post the results after the next update.

[CromeYellow]

Has anyone got any stats on what Google considers a duplicate page? I'm considering syndicating content and thought this could cause problems.

Cy

[dazz]

What if your have a site and want to have pages like 'Get to Amsterdam' 'Get to Brussels' 'Get to London' etc, all have different content on the places but has the same links to the booking pages. Is this ok?