How To Avoid Duplicate Content

[joebuilder]

We are an eCommerce site for autoparts.  It is basically impossible to avoid duplicate content, and I think we are getting penalized by Google for it.

Here is why it is impossible.  Let's say I sell a steering rack for a 2000 Honda Accord.  I need an SEO rich page for 2000 Honda Accord Steering Rack.  I sell steering racks for more than 25 years of Honda Accords.  I can try and make the copy different but there is no way to spin the copy that many times and make it seem like it is not duplicate copy.  This even gets more complicated because I sell hundreds of parts for each year of a Honda Accord, plus a lot of times you even have to go down to the engine size of the car for the right part.

I can't use a redirect, ie 301 redirect because they are not the same pages. One is for a 2000 Honda Accord and the other a 2001 Honda Accord, and so on.  Is their a redirect out there that I do not know about that would help me out in this case?

Also, if their is no way around this and I am getting penalized would it be better to eliminate all these pages, possibly losing my ability to rank high on searches such as "2000 Honda Accord Steering Rack," and just replace with a page that has a Year Make Model, and Part dropdown which just takes the customer a checkout page?

[copyjack]

You could add a rel=canonical tag to each duplicate page that points to the "parent" product page. The downside of doing this is that Google will probably not index the duplicate pages in search. This would definitely be better than eliminating the pages completely though.

[TakeshiYoung]

If you have tons of thin content pages, then it is a good idea to consolidate them into a parent page, and canonical to that parent page from all the subpages. Then focus on creating unique content for the the parent page.

If you have a lot of users, reviews and ratings can be a great way to add unique, user-generated content to your pages. You can incentivise people to leave reviews for you by offering a discount coupon for people who leave a review after making a purchase.