Hiding duplicates. Possible bug?

[Stereo Steve]

I have just set up my site with duplicate products. So, the main sections are the type of product but I also wanted people to be able to shop by brand so I set up a 'Shop By Brand' section with the brands as sub-sections and then duplicated the relevant products into here.

All good and it works great and will be especially usefull for adwords etc. One issue is when I set the main product to 'Hide' if we are out of stock. Our stock comes and goes and I need to hide and unhide products regularly. The problem is that the duplicate is still there on the site, despite the 'hide' box on the duplicate being ticked.

Is this something I'm doing wrong or a bug. Not a big issue but it means I need to delete the duplicate every time I hide the main product.

Also, on another quick note, do duplicates hurt SEO at all, bearing in mind the descriptions are identical or would it be wise to alter the description?

[pinbrook]

Also, on another quick note, do duplicates hurt SEO at all, bearing in mind the descriptions are identical or would it be wise to alter the description?
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if your duplicates are one product per page then yes you may get penalised for duplicate content

[Stereo Steve]

I use the extended info tab to get a product per page. Does this still apply?

[pinbrook]

if you end up with 2 pages with the same content then yes. It doesn't matter how they are generated.

[Stereo Steve]

What about if the pages have the same name? My main products have extended info links which lead to a popup page (opens in same window) which is called for example

http://www.website.co.uk./acatalog/DVM_076.html

Where DVM_076 is the product code. Keeps it nice and simple for me to give people links to particular products.

Now, in the duplicate, the popup page name defaults to something like info_1_DVM_076.html which I changed to just DVM_076.html, exactly the same as the popup page name for the main product. Uploaded and it works fine.

When I FTP the actalog folder I only see one DVM-076.html file (obviously)

So, the question is, what is happening here? Is Actinic duplicating the page or is it just linking to a pre-existing page? IF there is only one DVM-076.html on the server, surely I would not be penalised for duplicate content as it is only one page.

A bit confused by this one.

[pinbrook]

if you only have one page called dvm-076.html then you only have one page, it is impossible to have 2 pages with the same html name

[Stereo Steve]

Yeah, that's what I figured. Seems to work OK. Not sure how actinic is doing it but I guess if it works, I'll go with it.