If I had 4-6 paragraphs of text for every product on my site and one of the paragraphs was identical on each one would google see this as duplicate content. I need one of the paragraphs to be the same info but will find it difficult to write a differently worded paragraph for each. Do you see it being a problem to copy and past one paragraph?
One paragraph will just be explaining that the film is fitted without removing the glass, how to fit it, what tools youll need etc. This is the same for every product.
I wasn't really worried about it looking spammy as it won't be anything to do with our keywords and is important to the customer. I was more worried about Google not indexing the page as it classed it as duplicate content. Do you think this could happen.
It's not a big problem, what's important is the keyword targeting for each page/product, if you target the same keywords on each product page then you loose you should consider using the canonical tag it was created for these kind of issues
Excellent question. I too have content which I replicate over several pages i.e. one side of the column promotes / sells (replicates) the service whilst the other "main column" is unique to its page - variations of that services. Do search engines see the replication as replication?
There have been so many different interpretations on what constitutes duplicate content that it has become very confusing! Can anybody point to a link or anything where the real score can be found?
if one paragraph of text is identical through your site - google will simply ignore that when deciding what is your page about. make sure you have enough other (unique) content on the page for it to be indexed
It will be fine as long as the percentage of content that is duplicated is much smaller than the overall content on the page (otherwise you wouldn't be able to have sidebars, footers, disclaimers etc).
A canonical tag will only help where you have duplicate content and you want to display a PREFERRED url..... in the case of the op it is not what he is asking for and will have little-no value.
You do not want to use a canonical tag, judging by your original post. You can find the full details here; http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html