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I read somewhere that SEOMoz’s crawler marks a page in its Crawl Diagnostics as duplicate content if it doesn’t have more than 5% unique content.(I can’t find that statistic anywhere on SEOMoz to confirm though).

We are an eCommerce site, so many of our pages share the same sidebar, header, and footer links. The pages flagged by SEOMoz as duplicates have these same links, but they have unique URLs and category names. Because they’re not actual duplicates of each other, canonical tags aren’t the answer. Also because inventory might automatically come back in stock, we can’t use 301 redirects on these “duplicate” pages.

It seems like it’s the sidebar, header, and footer links that are what’s causing these pages to be flagged as duplicates. Does the SEOMoz crawler mimic the way Googlebot works? Also, is Googlebot smart enough not to count the sidebar and header/footer links when looking for duplicate content?

I work for an internet retailer that specializes in pet supplies and medications. I was going through the Crawl Diagnostics for our website, and I saw in the Duplicate Page Content section that some of our manufacturer pages were getting flagged.

The way our site is set up is that when products are discontinued we mark them as discontinued and use 301 redirects to redirect their URLs to other relevant products, brands, or our homepage. We do the same thing with brand and manufacturer pages if all of their products are discontinued. 90% of the time, this is a manual process.

However, the other 10% of the time certain products come and go automatically as part of our inventory system with one of our fulfillment partners. This can sometimes create empty manufacturer pages. I can't redirect these empty pages because there's a chance that products will be brought back in stock and the page will be populated again.

What can we do so that these pages won't get marked as duplicates while they're empty? Write unique short descriptions about the companies? Would the placement of these short descriptions matter--top of the page under the category name vs bottom of the page underneath where the products would go? The links in the left sidebar, top, and in the footer our part of our site architecture, so those are always going to be the same.

To contrast, here's what a manufacturer page with products looks like:

Thanks!

http://www.vetdepot.com/littermaid-manufacturer.html