Duplicate and thin content - advanced..

[nick-name123]

Hi Guys

Two issues to sort out..

So we have a website that lists products and has many pages for:

a) The list pages - that lists all the products for that area.
b) The detailed pages - that when click into from the list page, will list the specific product in full.

On the list page, we perhaps have half the description written down, when clicked into you see the full description.
If you search in google for a phrase on the detailed page, you will see results for that specific page including 'multiple' list pages where it is on.

For example, lets say we are promoting 'trees' which are situated in Manhatten. And we are also promoting trees in Brooklyn, there is a crossover. So a tree listed in Manhatten will also be listen in brooklyn as its close by (not from America so don't laugh if I have areas muddled)
We then have quite a few pages with the same content as a result.

I read a post a while back from the mighty Cutts who said not to worry about the duplicate unless its spammy, but what is good for one person, is spammy to another..

Does anyone have any ideas as to if this is a genuine problem and how you would solve?

Also, we know we have alot of thin content on the site, but we dont know how to identify it. It's a large site so needs something automated (I think)..

Thanks in advance

Nick

[nick-name123]

Thanks William. We found screaming frog recently. Why nobody ever told us about it before is amazing.

[WilliamKammer]

If you are worried about duplicate content in you search pages, that should be pretty easily solved with canonical tags. These will tell search engines which pages should be indexed, even if that pages' content is seen somewhere else on the site. Here's a link to more information on that: http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Even though Cutts said it shouldn't be an issue, he speaks in general terms (to put it lightly). Maybe Google tries to pick up the canonical version, but there's no harm in helping point Google in the right direction, just in case it doesn't crawl your site properly.

There are a few automated tools out there to crawl tons of pages and the potential issues on them. ScreamingFrog may be of use. There are also higher-level enterprise solutions to the problem like Searchlight Conductor.