I am creating a new site that sells products for 30 different college sports teams. Each team will have 10 products. All 10 products are the same for each of the 30 teams. Each team will have it's own page with the 10 items for that school.

My concern is that my products pages won't get indexed because I will have duplicate content (the same 10 products for 30 different teams).

My product description for my 10 items are duplicated for each team. I want to make a template for creating dynamic item descriptions.

I have devised the following system. Please let me know if you think the following will work successfully to create unique content that the search engines will index.

Sample template for creating item descriptions...

For Item 1
----------
Sentence 1: will talk about the product
Sentence 2: uses for the product
Sentence 3: marketing bs

For each sentence I plan to create 3 or 4 versions for each product...

Possible options for each sentence...

Sample Football Item
--------------------
Sentence 1: This {team name} football is offical size[1], This {team name} football is made of all leather[2], This {team name} football can resist all weather conditions
Sentence 2: This is great for playing catch[1], kickers will love the distance this ball travels[2], Great practice ball for players of all ages[3]
Sentence 3: The best football around[1], No one makes better footballs than us[2], You'll love this item[3]

I plan to write a program that dynamically creates an item description for each type of item. If I created a Notre Dame football it would pick one version of sentence 1, one version of sentence 2, one version of sentence 3 and concatenate the three sentences to create my product description for that item.

Example Product Description for a Notre Dame football using sentence 1 version 2, sentence 2 version 1, sentence 3 version 3.

This Notre Dame football is made of all leather. This is great for playing catch. You'll love this item

Let me know if this content will be unique enough to rank well for each team.

Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs are non-malicious forms of duplicate content.

Shouldn't be a problem, read this:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

The issue is they are all similar but different products...

So sticking to my example, on the Notre Dame page I may be selling a football with a Notre Dame logo on it. On the USC page I may be selling the same football with a different logo. Therefore I can't have links to common content, I need to have the duplicate content listed on all pages. I would want my Notre Dame products page to show up in the search results for all my Notre Dame and likewise with my USC team items.

Notre Dame team page will have 10 items,
Nebraska team page will have 10 items,
...
USC team page will have 10 items.

Each of these 10 items will be the same but specific to a college. Therefore I can't link to one item because all of the items are slightly different. The reason I wanted to randomize the items was because in the near future I may need to add up to an additional 300 teams.

>Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs are non-malicious forms of duplicate content

That's exactly right, but even though it is not hurting anything else, still most of them will get kicked.

It may sound absurd but if you want all of them indexed you should consider making the extra effort of writing unique content for each one. You might then take the stuff that has to be *exactly the same* and put it in an image or in a frame and let that part get kicked.

>Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs are non-malicious forms of duplicate content

That's exactly right, but even though it is not hurting anything else, still most of them will get kicked.

It may sound absurd but if you want all of them indexed you should consider making the extra effort of writing unique content for each one. You might then take the stuff that has to be *exactly the same* and put it in an image or in a frame and let that part get kicked.

Great point JohnW and totally good advice to keep in mind!

I'm assuming based on what jcarey said that page content would differ based on there being various schools involved. Also because a site like this would require different images to show the same products with various school's logos.

Is that the case jcarey?

Bottom line, text content on ND Football page should not read the same as that for USC. There should also be a unique "Football" image for each "Football" page.

jcarey, when I first got started in SEO, I did something similar like you. Only this was for tickets. Didn't really work very well. There were other problems with the site, looking back, but still. Just sharing my experience with something similar like your situation.

yes i will have different images for each product. unfortunately writing unique content will be impossible because the amount of items will quickly increase from 10 x 30 = 300, to about 10 x 200 = 2000. It would be extremely tedious to rewrite all the descriptions.

bottom line though, do you think my idea will work if I add enough "options" for each sentence in my item descriptions? i plan to have unique content pertaining to the particular school on each page, so hopefully that boosts up the likelyhood of getting crawled.

the plan is the have the following structure...

[2 paragraphs of school related copy, completely unique]
[10 items descriptions, each item is the same except for the image, across each schol]

will the 2 paragraphs be enough to offset the item descriptions? or will the presence of the item descriptions themselves across all of my pages be enough to turn away the crawlers?

>will the 2 paragraphs be enough to offset the item descriptions? or will the presence of the item descriptions themselves across all of my pages be enough to turn away the crawlers

Yes (done right) and Yes (done wrong).

I will try to be more clear about my earlier suggestion: if you "take a picture" of the identical text description and display it on your product pages as an image instead of as text, and give it the image a different file name each time you use it, Google won't know or care that there is anything identical about the pages. All G will see is your paragraphs of unique content and some image of something. No problems.

Or, easier to manage for some sites, you can put all of the identical text descriptions on a seperate page and bring it in to each product page as an iframe.Again, you will have a page of unique text content for each product and still be providing the user with the description.

will this be considered as an attempt to hide content from the search engines... (eg. show humans and search engines different content)

Must there be separate product pages for each team? If possible I'd use 10 product pages with options to pick the team, such as large e-tailers do with size/color/pattern.

>will this be considered as an attempt to hide content from the search engines... (eg. show humans and search engines different content)

No, there will be no problem with either of these approaches when used as described and when used for a legitimate reason. Google wants to index your pages, but you have to help them ;-)

BTW this will not show humans and search engines different content, its all the same...just a matter of how it gets indexed.

thanks johnW, i'm definetly taking your advice into consideration.

jim, as far as usuability is concerned I think it would be easier to have different pages for all items. That way anyone looking for items for a certain school can see all product images at one time. plus, it would be harder for me to squeeze all the keywords that i need into the single product page.

jcarey, don't forget to check out the competition's pages and see how they are doing what you want to do!

yes i will have different images for each product. unfortunately writing unique content will be impossible because the amount of items will quickly increase from 10 x 30 = 300, to about 10 x 200 = 2000. It would be extremely tedious to rewrite all the descriptions.Doesn't seem like its that tedious if you want a lot of free traffic from Google...lol. If you don't take the time to make your pages unique, why should Google treat them like they are? Think about it.

I appreciate your idea of maximizing your effort versus reward but instead of thinking about how little you have to do to satisfy Google, you would be much better served thinking about what you could do to actually add value to a bunch of pages that are in reality, pretty much duplicates. That's a better long term strategy. Cause what if your strategy works today but Google tightens its filter next month? I recommend adding a user comment module. At least you could get your visitors talking about their favorite teams and that would definately add unique content to your pages.

How much repetition of keywords will there be in the site navigation if they're all done?

BEU, that's a great point! Jcary, more than likely others out there are doing something in some same regards, look at what someone highly ranked is doing and see how they did it. Not that you have to do exactly what they did, but may give you a good way to go about it... you probably don't have to reinvent the wheel...

BEU, that's a great point! Jcary, more than likely others out there are doing something in some same regards, look at what someone highly ranked is doing and see how they did it. Not that you have to do exactly what they did, but may give you a good way to go about it... you probably don't have to reinvent the wheel...

Good to see another ATLien on the board!;)