Our website is in the midst of a massive content enrichment project - we're moving from mostly catalog content to optimized web content. Our catalog and copy teams are hoping to include more product comparisons on the web (e.g. "unlike composite basketballs, rubber one's are more X..."), which can certainly provide useful information to our shoppers! However, from an SEO standpoint, we seem to have confused search engines when doing this in the past (i.e. the example above is currently ranked for a "composite basketball" term, not a rubber one).
So... What is the best way to provide useful product comparisons without confusing search engines?