Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?

[AISFM]

Hi,

I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties.

While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc.

1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content...

2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text?

3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc?

Thanks!

[Personnel_Concept]

Normally if two pages have similar content, you can use canonical tag to tell Google about your preferred page. But if you want to keep them both without using canonical then Google will randomly decide on of the 2 similar page.

Similar content is an issue for sure. though recently Google's algo has become complex and it can recognize type of the site like it seems to be OK for many eCommerce sites to have similar content.

But if you can reduce the percentage from 50 % to bit lower, it will be better I guess.