Question : SEO Technique - Is this going to end up in my site getting penalised?

Hi,

I'm trying to boost my sites search engine performance. We sell mobile content - applications that are available with varying numbers of devices for each product.

Each product has one page lists the product, and all compatible devices. We noticed that people seemed to be searching using phrases like... " for Sony K800".

What we have done is written our site map with multiple rewritten URLS - a url for each compatible device and application combination. From the site map and search engine point of view, this creates new page for every device model. The rewritten url is used by the page to write extra information relating to each particular device so the page adds extra info to the page title and page body.

" for Sony K800"  instead of just

We're not trying to spam the search engines, just display content in search engine listings in a way that will help  search engines match our terms, and display informative search titles to users.

The thing that concerns us, is that with the product description being the same on each "generated" page, except for the device specific stuff, I'm worried about two things:

1. The search engines think were spamming because of duplicate content.
2. We've generated a lot of pages in the site map (10000 at the moment) - albeit with a lower sitemap priority than the main pages. We're wondering if that will put the search engines off, or just take them ages to crawl the pages properly.

Can anyone provide any solid advice on this?

Thanks

Answer : SEO Technique - Is this going to end up in my site getting penalised?

With a content specific per application, and not a (application, device) pair specific content, you're closer to the duplicate content, as you can guess.

Here is what I would do:
reduce the common application description (hard cut to 50 words or use a summary content if available), and keep the full application text for the application page (itself listing every single page for each device...). Idea being that relative weight of application data ("generic" because identical for every single device) is not too high compared to device specific content.

Do insert as much as possible device specific info, in several place:

%appname% for %devicevendor% %devicename%

download now  %appname% for your %devicename% from %devicevendor%
%application summary%
{%appname%} is compatible with %devicevendor% %devicename%. See full compatibility list at {%appname_url%}

In the example, %variable% indicates a context specific content, {%text%} an hyperlink.

Hope this makes sense,

Werner.