Laser triangulation sensors offer a simple, non-contact and fast solution to measure displacement, position, vibration and thickness. However, these sensors are prone to target surface sensitivity since they rely heavily on a uniform back-scatter of the laser spot. Here, sources of measurement noise including surface texture, speckle, beam deflection and asymmetry are discussed. In addition, a few solutions using dithering as well as the beam shaping to reduce surface sensitivity are explored. It is shown that a simple ditherer would induce additional error and a solution is suggested to compensate for it.