Is there a problem when passages of text are repeating on varios pages?

[inlinear]

Hi Everybody,

I am working on travel-pages and there are 4 tours that all start their itinerary in "Manaus", so I have 4 pages containing all a passage of the same text about Manaus.

How will Google interpret this? Just pick one of the four pages in relation to Manaus Keywords and index, or index none of them?

What should I do, because there is no canonical tag for parts of pages?

I'm curious about what you think

Best regards,
Holger

[TakeshiYoung]

Why do you have 4 pages with the same content on it?

If it's not necessary to have 4 pages, then pick the one with the highest page authority, and use a 301 redirect to point all the other pages to the main one.

If you need the pages to exist from a user experience perspective, then use a canonical tag in the header to point all the duplicate pages to the main page.

If you want each of the pages to rank for different keywords, then create unique content for each of the pages.

[inlinear]

Hi Takeshi,

my client has a travel website where he is offering 4 different tours in the amazon. The itinerary is basically different for each tour. BUT all the tours start in Manaus, so there are 20-30 lines of text talking about Manaus and what they will visit there...

Its just a small part of the pages with the same content about Manaus... so  a redirect does not work as well as a canonical tag does not work here.

[TakeshiYoung]

Did you mean 20-30 words, or 20-30 lines?

Having a small excerpt of content across multiple pages is perfectly fine, as long as each page also has additional unique content. If it's a significant amount of content, though, I would try tailoring the content to each specific tour, or maybe include an excerpt with a link to the page containing the full description.

[inlinear]

The text is about 150 words. Basically I am curious if a small exerpt repeating on varios pages with different and unique content can have a bad influence on these pages?

Thanks for your help.

[TakeshiYoung]

A short excerpt is fine, as long as it's surrounded by larger amount of unique content.

[inlinear]

Hi Takeshi,

now I realized that my client is offering 4 tours in the amazon. He is just mixing the attractions and length of the items to create different tours. So there is a lot of duplicate content which may result in his bad pagerank (although his pages are ranking). On the one hand its good to see different combinations of itineraries but I think the concept of such a site should be different.

Each attraction with unique content should have its own page to be able to focus on different keywords. Then he should propose possible combinations of these attractions without repeating always the same content.

This will be the only way to make the site better... right?