Penalized for Similar, But Not Duplicate, Content?

[Stew222]

I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way.  The main reason for the similar content is three-fold:

1. Continuity of site structure across different products
2. Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content)
3. The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences.

Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages.

1. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp
2. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp
3. http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp

[EGOL]

I believe that google would consider these to be "cookie cutter pages".  That is when you have a standard page and several words or phrases are swapped in and according to the product.

Google started targeting these pages  several years ago and they are getting better and better at identifying them.

Their response to these types of pages can be....

-- filter most of them from the search results, this only hit the cookie cutter pages, but if you had lots of these pages it was a waste of the page rank that went into them that could have been used to support rankings on other parts of your site.

-- recently these are starting to result in a panda problem which can tank the rankings across your site

When you are offering these types of products the time required to write unique descriptions can pay off big time.   My approach is to make one page for several closely related items, offering all of them on a single page.  That makes a rich page instead of multiple near-duplicate pages.