Duplicate Titles, Meta Descriptions & Google

[lbohen]

We have 16,000+ products (audiobooks) in our ShopSite Pro Store and were severely affected by Google's Panda last year. We have fixed many duplicate title & meta description issues for individual audiobooks but Google is still reporting that we have hundreds of duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. I can see in our Webmaster Tools that these remaining duplicates come from a listening category such as Self-Help that has many ShopSite pages each with 50 audiobook titles. Here is an example:

http://www.audiobooksonline.com/selfhelp_cds_audiobooks.html
<title>Audiobooks (compact discs) - audio books - audiobook</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="audiobooks books on tape cassette cd compact disc MP3"><meta name="description" content="Self-help audio books - personal growth, personal development, self improvement, health, lose weight, positive thinking, bernie siegel, john gray, andrew weil, zig ziglar, caroline myss, scott peck, suze orman, deepak chopra, wayne dyer, phillip mcgraw, john bradshaw, stephen covey"><link href="http://www.audiobooksonline.com/media/css/seo-styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

Our Self-Help category has eleven ShopSite pages. Page 1 is above. Page 2 has the same http address with -ss2.html on the end. Page three would have -ss3.html on the end. Even though each page within a multiple page category has a slightly different ending (-ss2, -ss3, -ss4...) Google considers the pages duplicates.

Also everyone of the eleven pages within the Self-Help category has the same meta description. Google doesn't like duplicate meta descriptions either.

Our SEO consultant believes these duplicate issues are hurting our positions in Google.

I would appreciate suggestions on how these "duplicate" situations above can be eliminated.

[loren_d_c]

Use the template tags in your titles that will add the page number to the title itself, see the description of the PAGE.PaginatedPageNum and PAGE.PaginatedPageNumMax tags in the Custom Page Template Spec here:

http://www.shopsite.com/help/11.1/en-US/sc/pro/custom.template.spec-page.html

Here is an example of how one of the built-in templates may use these tags:

[-- IF PAGE.Title --]
<title>[-- PAGE.Title --][-- IF PAGE.PaginatedPageNum NE 0 --] | Page [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNum --] of [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNumMax --][-- END_IF --]</title>
[-- ELSE --]
<title>[-- PAGE.Name REMOVE_HTML --][-- IF PAGE.PaginatedPageNum NE 0 --] | Page [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNum --] of [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNumMax --][-- END_IF --]</title>
[-- END_IF --]

-Loren

[Teddy Bear]

Larry-

If you use [-- IF PAGE.PaginatedPageNum NE 1 --] instead of [-- IF PAGE.PaginatedPageNum NE 0 --] first page won't show "Page 1 of x" in the title tag. No value showing it on the first page or when a category only has one page.

Gary