How should we handle ecommerce section pages (flagged with duplication) containing the same products?

[Safelincs]

We've removed a ton of errors, duplication and other stuff since signing up to SEOmoz Pro, but we're getting to the point where what we have left isn't that easy to fix. On one of our (ecommerce) sites we have several sections where people buy products that are applicable to the area of the home. In one or two instances, a particular list of products is the same for two or more different areas - for instance the "Bedroom and Landings" and "Hallway and Stairs" sections may list  the same 10 products. This is obviously flagging up as duplication in our reports.

What is the best way to handle this situation? Make the one with the highest authority canonical? Point both to another canonical page? Or, try and convince the product department that we should have a more generically name section that both link to?

Thanks for any advice!

[MagicDude4Eva]

If the products are exactly the same mark all products with the same canonical URL. If the duplication is not on URL level, but title suffix the title with the deparment/area.

[Safelincs]

The products only exist at one URL - but they can appear in multiple sections. The sections have different titles/descriptive text at the top, but list the same products.

[MagicDude4Eva]

If you have multiple sections listing the same products and there is only one product URL (and the product page itself uses a canonical) there isn't an issue. (and I am not quite sure where the duplication problem comes in).

i.e. "Bedroom" would list "/lamp.html" and "/carpet.html" as unique product URLs. Your "Hallway"-section would also list "/lamp.html" and "/carpet.html" - although there is duplication of products on the listing pages, this is irrelevant from an indexing/SEO perspective.

Your category URLs (Bedroon and Landings) are also unique and not the actual cause of duplication (i.e. a category map with unique anchor texts but duplicate URLs and not canonical)?

[Matt-Williamson]

Is your descriptive text very similar and thin?

I have had a similar situation and all I did was take some time to beef up the content of the page and make sure it was unique - this resolved the issue which I believe you have - even though the list of products was the same..

I know the areas are very similar but with some thought  you should be able to produce some unique content for it, if your current content is similar and thin?

[Safelincs]

Yes - to both you and @MagicDude4Eva - it seems this is about the thin content as opposed to the index of products listed there. Page titles and URLs are indeed unique, but the content can certainly be worked on. Thanks a lot for your help