If my site is “filtered” down to oblivion because I have duplicate content…call it what you want, the outcome is the same.

I would lose money because my site isn’t ranking well in the serps. That, my friend, is a penalty in many shapes and forms even though it is not officially called a penalty. It sure isn’t a “job well done” is it?

Fact is, you’re site gets filtered/penalized by having the same content as another. Don’t downplay and underestimate the google “filter” because it can be damaging for your business.

You need to understand what google considers material that will be “filtered” and material that wont. I suggest you read googles website once in a while before you post rubbish.

Your problem is not duplicate content (remember, it’s a filter, not a penalty)

I had a look at your site and I found the reason why you were Google-blasted, and sent you an email about it.

Thanks for reading Get Elastic,

fingers crossed you get back in the Google action after correcting the problem. If not, I would file a re-inclusion request.

~Linda

Anyways, Jeff makes a good point – duplicate content on the same site = canonicalization issue. Duplicate content on two different sites = duplicate content issue.

As to colours, if someone wants shoes in a specific colour, it seems that indexing the various product pages featuring the specific colours would be a good idea.

From a merchant’s perspective, you could get around the canonicalization issue by listing matching outfits that most people would have in their wardrobe. Obviously it helps to know who your clients are in this situation, and it gets expensive to scale this. But you can templatize it to an extent (e.g. “white shoes” should often be highlighted with black skirts and white tops, or perhaps with beige/summery pants/shorts…)

Perhaps a nocache attribute (that keeps page out of Google cache) will prevent that. However, if you show stock levels on site, and you’re sold out, you could direct them to similar colors or similar styles. Yes a lot of custom programming…

Great for usability – you can look at dresses and click the color swatches to change – but they’re all in Flash. Example: http://www.dessy.com/dresses/bridesmaid/2721/

Throw this into Google to see if you can find any pages optimized for pink:
pink site:http://www.dessy.com/

Nada.

There should be special landing pages for each of these colors at the very least. “Pink bridesmaid dresses” bla bla bla – link to Flash app or have the Flash app embedded.

Like they do with branded terms:
http://www.dessy.com/dresses/bridesmaid/d400/

Just goes to show you that you can’t take anything for granted that you’ve read on SEO until you run a few tests. I long thought that using a tactic like this would simply be fruitless because Google would filter out the additional, or duplicate, pages. Here we see evidence that that is most definitely not the case.

Definitely something to keep in mind when putting together an SEO strategy for any website.