How does google react to duplicate shops on ecommerce sites

[borderbound]

Surely shopping cart sites are going to have a lot of duplicate content? Does google recognise this? Is there anything I can do let google know?

[gfiorelli1]

With shopping cart do you mean literally the shopping cart an user have while shopping in an eCommerce? If it is so they are not seen and crawled, therefore no duplication issues are existing.

If you mean that different eCommerce sites can have identical content one each other... yes, if they both use the same product description. In that case, if they do not have done anything to add value to that description (i.e.: ugc content like reviews, comments, testimonials), then Google with see them as substantially duplicates.

If the duplication is related to just one site (i.e.: product in different categories and bad urls'architecture), then Google will filter the product pages and show only the most relevant... but if the duplication issue is affecting the highest percentage of the site (and, also, the descriptions are thin and identical to others sites ones)... then the risk of being pandasized is quite big, as it happened with the last version of Panda, the 2.5

[borderbound]

I suppose I do mean in relation to just one site.

Yes, some products are going to go in more than one category - it makes it more usable.

My products are pretty.. well, simple! There's nothing I can talk about for ages so each page has an image one line of text (maybe 3 at most) and then obviously like most shops - links to other products.

It just occured to me today that if it were any other site and not a shop  -it would look a bit spammy.

[gfiorelli1]

In your case my suggestion is to use this kind of URL structure for product pages: www.domain.com/product This way, independently of the categories it is part of, users and search engines will see just one url and you will avoid inopportune duplication.

[borderbound]

Great advice. I don't suppose you also know how I would change the URL?

[gfiorelli1]

That depends on the eCommerce you are using. If it an open source one, check for SEO/SEF plugins in the community or ask help in the developers community asking for plugins/module that offers you that opportunity.