How to avoid product's lists from making your site's content duplicated?

[alexmc]

Hi there!

We at Outitude, recently launched an outdoor activities marketplace and to make it easy for users to compare activities we show a list of available activities in each activity view.

The problem is that though the content is different, the first half is practically identical.

Example:
Sailing for a full day: http://outitude.com/en/sailing/world/sailing-full-day and sailing for half a day: http://outitude.com/en/sailing/world/sailing-half-day both URL's are different, their content is different but most of it is not (first half of the page), so that the user can compare the activity it is currently seing with others.

Questions:

1. How can we show the activities list without it ruining the page rank?
2. Do you advise the use of "", "" surrounding the duplicated content aka activities lists?

Thanks in advance.

[matbennett]

If it were me I would be looking to make the pages more unique.

Even just a small bit of unique text, tying in with differences can be enough to prevent issues.  We've seen this on commerce sites that have multi-faceted navigation that effective create long lists of similar pages.

I'd be looking to add a few lines, even just 3 or four sentences to each page.  Get that high up in the code and have it relate to the page.  I know that lots of people talk about having 500 words of unique content, but I don't think that level is neccessary (nice if you can though!).

You can get freelancers through odesk or similar to do this sort of work very affordable.

However, if you want to stop a piece of content, like a list being indexed your main options are probably:

• Show the list as a image
• Use javascript (although no guarantees this will do the job)

I do think that this is really trying to hide symptoms, rather than dealing with the cause though.

With regards to googleoff/on I don't think these are what you think they are.  Someone may correct me, but I think that they apply to search appliance, not the public google search index (off to check now!)

Edit : Yes... I am not going mad. That tag relates to search appliance, which is something totally different to the search that you use at google.com etc.