Variable Products and Category Pages and Redundant Content

I have a category page that has images of all my different colors, but all the images in this category pages link to one variable product page with their variation specified. This is done so that my customers can see the full color palette on the category page, but the product description is in only one place (the variable product) to avoid a redundant content penalty.

The problem is that my category page and my variant product page need to have more or less the same title and descriptive text. Of course, the variant product page has more detailed information, but there is some basic content that I want to appear on both pages to make sure my customers see it. (Years of customer service dictate that it must be both places.)

My questions:

Will Google penalize me for redundant content for this, or is their algorithm smart enough to understand the relationship between category and product pages?

What should I do to make them different without artificially writing different content?

I would love to see a good example.

Got a link to Google documentation? AFAIK there is no “penalty”

Thanks Bluedreamer and Mittineague. I don’t think I phrased my question very well. In place of “penalize” read “not get the full advantage of my original content.”

I can find information about text on the category page versus the text on the product pages, but not for the more specific case where every product on the category page is a variant of one product. This situation would be encountered by anyone needing to display a full palette of colors on the category page, so I am a little surprised that I haven’t found any relevant discussion.

Thanks,

Personally I wouldn’t worry about it since its useful for the customer to see a page a colours to choose from, and that’s the most important things.

Search engines will see those colour products as “duplicates” if the product page content is essentially identical, so normally they’re just list one product and relegate the rest further down in the index.

Of course if you’re still worried you could take it from another angle and have one product page with colour choices as an option…

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