How unique does a page need to be to avoid "duplicate content" issues?

[WhiteCap]

We sell products that can be very similar to one another. Product Example: Power Drill A and Power Drill A1 With these two hypothetical products, the only real difference from the two pages would be a slight change in the URL and a slight modification in the H1/Title tag. Are these 2 slight modifications significant enough to avoid a "duplicate content" flagging? Please advise, and thanks in advance!

[RyanKent]

Those two products would be viewed as duplicate content. It is the same for clothing, for example. If you offer a shirt in various sizes (S,M,L,XL) and colors (blue, brown, red) they all should be offered on the same page. Otherwise consider the mess:

small red shirt

medium red shirt

large red shirt

...and so forth. For your drill you can offer a single page "Acme Cordless Drill 18v" and offer a base model and then another model with "3 speeds" or "keyless chuck" or whatever other features make them different.

[BrianCrouch]

Would it be possible to create a category page for the product type, and represent the models with expandable divs?

If you have to maintain separate pages for models with unique feature sets (separate SKUs) one tactic you could employ is to rel=canonical the individual product pages to the main category page.

Other questions: are the images unique: is the alt tag unique for each image, and filename?  Is there a distinctive SKU or model name which can be part of the canonical?

I had a similar situation with an audio product manufacturer. Some speakers were sold as pairs, some as individual units, some where identical product information except for color. Our solution was a a change towards category pages, since for the most part that was better for retail partners discussing our products in general, and it was easier to handle the issues involved with product end-of-life.