Duplicate page content errors in SEOmoz

[ketanmv]

Hi everyone, we just launched this new site and I just ran it through SEOmoz and I got a bunch of duplicate page content errors. Here's one example -- it says these 3 are duplicate content:

• http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-black-3inch
• http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-camel-3inch
• http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-gray-3inch

You'll see from the pages that the titles, images and small pieces of the copy are all unique -- but there is some copy that is the same (after all, these are pretty much the same shoe, just a different color).

So, why am I getting this error and is there any best way to address?

Thanks so much!
Ketan

[AlanMosley]

I would not worry, if SE's see it the same way, then one will rank higher then the rest, not a big deal, they will still find the show, then can select color

[RyanKent]

Why am I getting this [duplicate content] error?

Because the pages are almost exact duplications of each other. I compared the black and camel colors and there was only one sentence on the page which was altered, along with 3 images and the selected color option. 95% of the pages are identical.

Is there any best way to address?

Yes, the canonical meta tag is designed for this type of situation. A search engine will presently crawl all three pages and then pick one page to index. Rather then the search engine make the choice, you should. I would recommend adding the canonical tag to the headers of your HTML code. Pick whichever color is the most popular and present it in search engines.

If you feel it is really important to have all three pages indexed, you could take another approach. Add additional content to each page which is unique. For the black shoes, you can add images of someone wearing them with matching outfits and add content about famous people who were seen wearing those shoes. Also you can allow users to add comments to each shoe. The comments would add additional uniqueness to each page.

If you choose the latter approach, it is very important you write for readers, not for the search engines. I know your end goal may be to have the page indexed, but if you add junk content, or simply re-arrange words and replace synonyms search engines will likely detect it and downgrade the page's ranking.

[AlanMosley]

One other choice is to have one page, and change the content dynamicly