I have a site which sells movies. The movies are presented in categories. Every movie has a description, which includes information on the movie's director, producer, etc. This information is taken from a database. In many instances, many movies in the same category will have the same directors, producers, etc., so the same information will be repeated loads of times on the same page. Is that considered duplicate content? Might my site be penalised? Is there a general limit of how many times you can repeat content?
Duplicate content more refers to when entire articles are published on more than one website. It is not really a huge problem that those director/producer names get repeated. If you're worried about it, make a point of putting a bunch of unique content on each page to dillute those repeated words. What you're really talking about is keyword density. As those phrases get repeated more the keyword density increases. If the keyword density is too high there is a chance you may trigger some type of spam filter. Generally I try to stick to under a 10% keyword density.
Thanks for the feedback, Vansterdam. The information I present for the directors, producers, etc., is quite extensive. It's not just their names. There might be up to five or six paragraphs discussing a single director. And if that director has directed other films in the same category, the information will appear again and again on the same page. The information is collapsed and only expands when clicked, so all of the duplicate content is not visible at once. Is that bad for the search engines? Interesting . . . I never took that into account. Thank you.
I agree with "vansterdam" How can they "know" when every page is published? They will know when they first found a page but that does NOT mean it is the original. Also, For more in details. Refer
what you SHOULD be doing is having a 'bio page' for your people, and store their details once, on that page. Then your movie categories can just have a 'snippet' from it (perhaps even taken at random) with a link to the full page.
hmmmmmm, here's my suggestion, just make sure that every page don't have the same meta tags: "keywords" "description" and "title"