Hi, We've recently revamped our website. As part of trying to create more targetted information for our clients - we created 4 different FAQ sections (Professional Photographers, Artists, Resellers, Retail) While each section starts with a unique set of FAQ's the majority of content on each page is general and is therefore duplicated. Is it likely that having four sets of substantively identical content will result in some kind of penalty. As an illustration: http://www.brilliantprints.com.au/FAQretail.html and: http://www.brilliantprints.com.au/FAQpro.html Any assistance would be greatly appreciated - as we spent a large amount of time creating content for this iteration - but would prefer it didn't backfire Thanks Dylan
You are excellently placed to answer this question if you go ahead and implement your changes. Nobody outside of google et al has the kind of information to answer the question. But as a guess - it looks like the 2 pages you gave are identical, and if I was developing a search engine I would show only one page. It wouldn't benefit searchers to show both pages. What's your gut feel?
To be honest - it was primarily a convenience thing for people looking at the page - trying to reduce even to a small extent what are pretty hefty FAQ's by splitting some specific content off. But in reading your response I think I've probably answered my own question No reason not to have the bulk of the FAQ's in one section - and split the photographer/artist content into its own micro-section. Hopefully, avoiding the need to even worry about it. Thanks Dylan
I have a nice content site. It had 6 pages, all PR2, I thought that was OK for a 9 month old site. Then I found a bunch of public domain stuff. Very on topic. I added some commentary and research, edited the material, added pictures, navigation. Made a d@mn nice place for folks to visit IMHO. Took the better part of a month to get it right - about 60 additional pages added to the original 6. Google plastered me. Now the only page that has any PR is the home page (still a 2) and Google hits are WAY down. They went way up in the first few weeks, then I guess they found that the original material was from Gutenberg and elsewhere and decided that not only was the materal valueless, but the rest of my site was also. I guess nobody over there has heard of "derivative works". Take public domain stuff and make something new out of it. But who really knows what goes on inside the mind of Google.
You can hire outsourced writers to reword the FAQs but retain the same meaning OR you can check the content block by block using http://www.webmasterlabor.com/tools/checker and changing only the blocks that are duplicates.
I wouldn't expect to see a problem with your home page. There may be issues if you are concerned about having the SE index your FAQ pages though.