How to Handle “Necessary” Duplicate Content

I was conducting a site review yesterday for a company that sold unfinished wood furniture.  All their product pages listed the available wood grades and finishing options.  The information didn’t need to change from product to product as the exact same wood grades and finishing options were applicable for each one.  With hundreds of products, it really wasn’t feasible to rewrite the information 100 different ways.

What do you do?  This wasn’t just 25 words or so.  The section contained almost 150 words of copy and it was being duplicated on page after page.  The information wasn’t meant to be spammy, but still, it might be viewed negatively by the engines.

The fastest and least expensive way to correct problems like this is to include the information in text version on one page.  For all the other pages, create a graphic that looks just like the text version.  The visitors get the information they need, the search engines still get to read the keyword-rich copy on one page, but you don’t risk having pages filtered for duplicate content.

Problem solved! :)

Want Karon to write SEO copy for you?  Visit http://www.marketingwords.com.  Rather learn to write copy yourself?  Get Karon’s copywriting course at http://www.copywritingcourse.com.

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One Response to “How to Handle “Necessary” Duplicate Content”

  1. copywriter39 - July 7th, 2008

    Karon, This is an interesting solution. I’ve recently encountered a similar problem with a client. They don’t offer different products, but instead different locations, all using the same description, except for their address. We’re redoing the copy for each page, which is feasible because they only have a half dozen locations. But I could see the difficulty if they had hundreds of locations.

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