I'm creating a very involved, database-driven, white hat content site. Some of my features might be perceived as duplicate content and/or cloaking by Google's crawler, even though they're nothing of the sort. Should I be worried? For example, my topic involves several scientific terms of varying obscurity which many users won't know, so I've built a glossary into my database. Any time an article uses one of those terms, my site highlights it and puts an invisible div containing the definition inline after the word, which the user can expand by clicking the term. It's a very good feature for the users, but will search engines think it's hidden content? Another issue is that many of the terms appear on many pages. Will having a common term's definition repeated on 200 pages across my site look like duplicate content? I have a few other possible "duplicate content" problems too, because my data is arranged in a hierarchy. Say I have a bunch of widgets. These are the pages on different levels of the hierarchy: Widgets Big Widgets, Little Widgets Big Red Widgets, Big Blue Widgets, Little Red Widgets, Little Blue Widgets Users who don't care about size and color can just browse the Widgets page and see every widget. Users who want only Little Widgets can browse that page, and so on. I have a little blurb about a particular Little Red Widget. That blurb will appear on the Little Red Widget page, but also on the Little Widgets page and the Widgets page. Is that "duplicate content?" Very few actual individual pages will have near-identical content overall, but most of them will have pieces of content which appear on other appropriate pages.
Hi Troutnut, I'm not an expert on duplicate content, but I don't think you probably have anything to worry about. The type of duplication you're referring to exists on the vast majority of legitimate websites on the Web. When I think "duplicate content", I think duplicated articles - not words or phrases. HTH, Sam