asked this in a couple of other places, but thought i’d ask ‘the oracle’ too…

here is the site situation presently…

child pages have duplicate content from parent page, and also unique content

(eg ‘mens jackets’ parent with product info, ‘mens marmot jackets’ child with product info and company info)

i want the duplicate content only to be seen by google on the parent, not the child. this will stop the child being penalised for having duplicate content.

but i want the child’s unique content to be ‘visible’ to google, so that the page appears in longtail searches for ‘mens marmot jacket’.

my problem therefore is that i don’t want to ‘no index’ the child page, nor insert rel=canonical for the whole page either, as the child will then get no credit from google.

is there any way i can ‘no index’ or rel=canonical only certain (duplicate) sections of the child page (in my example, the jacket product info, but NOT the company info)?

otherwise, is there anything totally obvious we’re missing here?

the site has a lot of dynamically created content, and so this is not something we can implement manually on each page.

does this make sense? it is probably clear that i’m no coding expert, which is why i’m asking.

(i don’t actually sell jackets, but its an easy example – if someone really knows their stuff and wants to give me a quick hand, i can send links to our dev site! (obv don’t want to put this out publicly yet))

You don’t want to do either. Don’t worry about the company info being duplicate, you probably actually want it on each page anyway and you want it indexed. As you said you also don’t want the canonical tag here either. If you want to do something then keep the company info. down at the bottom of the page and below the fold where Google will pay less attention to it anyway. Instead pay more attention to your page titles, H1 tags, what shows up at the top of the page when you go there, how interesting your site is anyway. To use your example, if all you have is a list of jackets and prices people won’t stay too long. If you include articles that people might read about how to pick a jacket, what the different materials are etc. and link back to the stuff on your site then that is worth a lot more.

Usual disclaimer – I’m not a pro so may be wrong. This is just what I do on our site and it seems to work well (and no-one else had answered. It always seems sad to have a thread with no replies)

sorry for the delay in replying – went on my hols!

have read elsewhere that duplicate content isn’t so much of an issue… hmm… our SEO consultant said otherwise (as did our understanding of it).

have a chunk of reading on the google penguin update to do today, maybe that’ll shed some new light on it 😐

Google won’t penalise you as such for two or three versions of the same thing on a site.

It’s not going to index every version though. Generally it will pick the one that it thinks is the original. If you’re running a shop I guess this could be an issue.

Place unique content first in the markup with the duplicate below and use CSS to position appropriately on the page?

As I understand it, this will make the site more accessible to users with disablities and/or those on non-desktop browsers as well as producing more Google-friendly pages.

thanks! will give all this a good read this afternoon… beginning to believe duplicate may not be too much of an issue then!!

Sack the SEO expert! Google doesn’t like it when you try to mask content as it thinks you’re up to something.

Just leave it as it is. Unique, fresh content is much more important than worrying about some duplicate stuff. All sites have duplicate content in some shape or form to some exent (links, footers, headers etc.)