Hi, I have articles on my site where I then have another link where people can get the article code for the article listed. This article code is in a form so people can easily copy and paste it. For example <form><textarea>A great article about so and so....</textarea></form> Code (markup): I was wondering if Google and other search engines will see the text in the form and use it in ranking a website. If so then do you think it will be best if I put something in my robots.txt file so that it doesn't crawl the articles page where the form is on and only the page where the actual article is on so that I don't have duplicate content. If it follows the information in the form then I would really have 2 duplicates of each article on my site. Hope you understand what I mean and hope you can help. Thanks!
So do you think it would be best to stop the search engine from crawling the page with the form on so that I don't have 2 duplicate pages for each article. Shall I stop it buy using the robot.txt file.
in my opinion no not at all the more pages you have indexed the better the traffic, dont take for granted all you read on these sites i have been at this since 95 and i do SEO and some of the stuff you read is nonsense, take it from me your in fine shape
So two pages that are nearly the same on a single domain is better than just having one page that is not duplicate. Although the two pages are not the same really, they just have about 60 - 80% of the same keywords as the same article is on both of the pages. So you are saying this will not affect my rankings.
I read somewhere that Search Engines give lesser importance to items inside a <fieldset> tag - can anyone verify this?
it depends, if your content is mostly in tags, then SEs should care, if most content not in tags, then they don't care more
Very similar pages on the same site don't seem to harm your ranking, but you may find that google only lists one of them.