Best practice to solve this Unique duplicate page content issue?

[danielpett]

I just got Seomoz Pro (it's awesome!), and when I did a campaign for my website I discovered that I have a big issue with duplicate page content (as well as titles).

The Crawl Diagnostics Summary told me I have 196 Crawl Errors Found (I had a total of 362 pages crawled on my site), and as much as 160 of these was duplicate page content. Which to me sounds like a big problem, correct me if I'm wrong (I'm very new to SEO).

So our website is an ecommerce that sells greeting cards. The unique part about our platform is that we offer the customer to make a customization of the cards.
Let me walk you through each step a customer takes so you fully understand:

1. They find a card they like and visit the product page of that card (just like on any ecommerce store.)

2. They then decide they want to buy it. There is no "Add to cart" button, they will instead click on a "customize the card" button.

3) This takes them to a step by step process of customizing the card. They change the name on the front of the greeting card so it says for example: "Happy Birthday Katy!". And then adds a personal text on the inside of the card.

4. They then add an delivery address and when it should be delivered. After that they proceed to checkout and it's all done.

This is my website (it's in Swedish): loveday.se - it will take you to a product page so that you can click the green button and see what I mean with the customization pages. Hopefully it helps even though it's in Swedish.

My issue starts at the customization part of the site (the bolded step above), as I can see the permalinks in the diagnostics I got.
This step-by-step process looks exactly the same with every card in the store. Same call-to-action headline, same descriptive text etc. The only difference is a JPEG-file with the unique greeting card design.

So, what is your take on this? Let me know if I was unclear about something.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

[CoreyNorthcutt]

Could you provide a few samples of URL's that SEOmoz Pro claims contain duplicate content?  It should show you if you click on the error, then click on individual links.

[danielpett]

When looking at this link: http://www.loveday.se/personifering/1/utan-facebook

I get these sample URLs (It says it's a total of 50 duplicate URLs):
 http://www.loveday.se/personifering/168/julkortshang

http://www.loveday.se/personifering/145/far-motherfucker

http://www.loveday.se/personifering/123/prispokal

http://www.loveday.se/personifering/136/gravitation

http://www.loveday.se/personifering/63/fing-love-you

I'd say that out of all the 160 duplicate content pages, 99.9% of them have the same link path of http://www.loveday.se/personifiering/... Which is the customization page.

[CoreyNorthcutt]

I see what you mean.  Here's what you do for these particular pages.

Since these have no real value as a search engine landing page (since they're basically all the same), Google won't want to send people to them.  Seems reasonable, right?

But, because your site has a whole lot of these, Google may also decide that loveday.se as a whole is feeding them content that has a high % of non-useful pages.   It's an indicator of an overall low-quality site.  This really started to become an issue with the first "Panda" update.  So, for each of these particular pages, you want to add a tag to your HEAD section:

| name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> |
| We tell Google "noindex", because we don't want these pages in their index (really, they don't either, so everyone is happy).  They're terrible landing pages for a search engine. |

We tell Google to "follow", because the other pages that these are linking to are still of value.  And we want Googlebot to continue crawling and crediting internal links on your site.

[danielpett]

Ahh, I see! Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it.

I also found from reading one of evovlingSEO's blog posts that with the help of checking my google webmasters account for any reports on duplicate content, I could see if Google had found any duplicate content.

There was no reports on this, so I guess it could be Roger crawling pages that Google don't? But I can see from viewing my source code that the code snippet you suggested me to add isn't there.

I will get back when I know if it's been solved or not for sure!

Thanks again.