I sell about 10 different products on my website. I have a page dedicated to each one. On each page I have a short description of the product and than the rest of the page is company information, order form, why you should buy from my company etc. The only unique content on the page is the short product description. The rest is the same on each page. The question do I have an duplicate content issue and if so how do I handle it?
You can write more content about each product on each page, and add related products or guides on each page. Hope it helps.
Well, I feel that duplicate content issues only hamper your website performance when most of the content on the page is duplicate. I would suggest you to expand the product details section a bit more so that Google can find more fresh content on the page.
Try to create unique title, meta description and also the content or product description for each page.
Also, it will help if you make the page-titles and meta-descriptions different for each page/product. You might have done this but you didn't mention it.
You don't have. Duplicate content, I suppose, is measured through the comparison of codes. If site1 and site2 use the same web template and copy contents from one another, then that's duplicate content. However, if site1 and site2 use different web template yet copy contents from one another, that is not likely a duplicate content (if we are to see the source code which is where search engine bots are looking at). A good example of this scenario is when a single copy article is submitted and approved by article directories. But search engines didn't penalize these article directories for having the same article simple because their bots see different site structure amongst article directories. To humans they might appear having duplicate content, but to bots it is a different story especially when it's under different coding.
Yes, you just make product descriptins large, I belive you are using each time different title, keywords etc for each produyct not same for all!
Create a separate page for company information and describe more details about your product. short summary or place a company logo on each page to hyperlink company page.
Well, You need to make proper, original meta tags for each pages. Don't repeat content it's harmful for sites. Also add original content on each page of site about your site product which you sales, can your keyword bold and make anchor text too in content.
As long as you got "authority" aka good links coming in to the site, the duplicate content issues is not that crucial. There are plenty of site that outrank article sources on authority alone.
Kind of. As its the same site (i.e not syndicated content) you can do away with some of what you have on the page - company information, why buy etc can be summarised and then linked to another page with the full information. Without seeing the site in question its hard to say, but if in doubt you can always refer to the google comment here; http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.