Many items with similar descriptions showing up as duplicate page titles

[BakerBayBeadCo]

Hi,

We are just a small company trying to understand this seo business. :O)  I hope you will give us your input on how we look and how we can improve.

www.bakerbay.com

Each week I go down the seomoz crawl and change the duplicate page titles it increases the duplicate page content. Then the next week it seems to find other titles that have been fixed that are afluwie now. Please help. We are a bead company and alot of our products have a similar description but have different colors and items numbers. Could you please advise me on how to fix these errors and increase our ranking?

All the Best,

Beth

[BakerBayBeadCo]

Thank you for the info. We are just learning and testing using the language of seo. Your answers have supported the direction we felt we needed to go but wanted a second opinion from someone who understood the whole picture. All the Best... Beth

[AlanBleiweiss]

Canonical is most effective in reducing the number of pages indexed.  Doesn't address any issues related to unique content to the degree you need to add a lot more unique content to each page you do want indexed.

[BakerBayBeadCo]

Thank you very much for responding to our question...  I was afraid you might say that... is there not a way we could use the famous "canonical" (crossed fingers) to help?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Beth,

Unfortunately when you've got a lot of products where the only difference between SKUs is color and item number, it means you need to artificially implement uniqueness.  This requires becoming creative with product names and descriptions.  Since I see you've already got product names covered fairly well, let's talk about descriptions.

If you go to a sample page, such as for the Charlotte Cut Beads, look at the page both from a "length of description" aspect as well as an "overall content" aspect.

That very short description is quite likely to be seen as at least partly, if not mostly duplicate from other descriptions on the site.  And at the same time, the total weight of unique content compared the the entirety of the page (with the header, side navigation and footer being replicated across many pages on the site) and you have a bigger problem in hoping to get this designated as a unique page.

Even though it may seem like a burden to have to produce paragraphs of content for a single product page, without that extended unique description for every product, you'll always have problems.

You may be better off changing how your site works than trying to struggle with the current issues.

For example, when I go to the Charlotte Cuts category page, maybe you should have this be the single page people go to so they can choose which products to add to their cart - eliminating the final individual product "details" page (since there really are no "details" on those.

Then, I'd recommend adding a couple paragraphs of well written and optimized content for that category page.