Multiple products with legitimate duplicate descriptions

[SoundinTheory]

We are redeveloping a website for a card company who have far too many products to write unique descriptions for each. Even if they could I don't think it would be beneficial to the user. However they do have unique descriptions for each range which is useful for users viewing an individual card.

Which is better practice:

a) Ignore the duplicate content issue and supply the user with info about the range

b) Provide clear enticing links to find out more about the range which will leave the individual card page a little void of content.

Many thanks

[MikeRoberts]

What sort of cards are we talking about? I immediately think "greeting cards" when you say that but I don't want to just assume that's the case. But if it is then from a personal user experience standpoint I would say that I would be more likely to search a specific range & gain more from finding a category page for a range of cards in the SERPs than I would from a page with an individual card on it. I.E. I'm more likely to search "birthday cards" or "get well cards" or "thank you cards" than I would to search "that birthday card with a grumpy cat that has balloons and a smushed cake". In which case I'd say go with robust category pages and, if possible, consider canonicalizing the individual cards to the category if you're going to also use the content of the parent category on the individual pages. If it's not greeting cards... well then I wrote all of this for nothing. (unless its playing cards... what I wrote might work for that as well)

[Anti-Alex]

Meta descriptions won't get you penalized for duplicate content so there's no need to worry about that. The descriptions are really just what you see in the Google Search. Users are more likely to click a link that has a nice descriptive description that leads them into the content you're looking for. Of course a custom description is always best for each individual page/product, but in some cases the time isn't worth it.

I'm not sure what you mean with clear links on B, but A is a perfectly fine solution if there are just too many pages. A good options might be to create a generic description that uses the product name as a variable. ie: "My (Car) is red", "My (Cart) is red", etc.

[SoundinTheory]

Apologies, I should have said greetings cards, so this is indeed very helpful, thank you

[SoundinTheory]

Although in additon there is the issue about the card page lacking in enticing content which could reduce the chance of a conversion. Becuase this is a predominently visual subject pehaps I am just worrying about the lack of text as it fundamentally goes against usual SEO rather than benfitting usability.

[SoundinTheory]

Sorry again I should have been clearer it is not really the meta data I am concerned about at this point more the benefit of on-page content. I think the bigger issue is that for organic search traffic card pages are almost redundant and focus, as Mike says should be on the range pages which should encourage browsing.

[Anti-Alex]

Sounds like you have a good handle on it. As Mike recommends, focusing on the more category-style pages is definitely more appealing to a user looking to browse the site. At the end of the day, beyond SEO, the end-user is really what you care about. Another suggestion might be to make the single card pages more like category pages. Show cards from the same category, suggest similar cards or categories. Related links are one of the best ways to promote pageviews and get both the end-user as well as a googlebot interested in "crawling" more pages. That's a bonus on all fronts.

[Anti-Alex]

Also make sure all your page titles are unique. While descriptions don't matter that much, titles should be unique or at the very least descriptive and targeted for your keywords.

[SoundinTheory]

Many thanks Alex, already on all of the points mentioned above but always nice to get some validation for plans of action... half the time that's more satisfying than coming up with them!