Best Way to Incorporate FAQs into Every Page - Duplicate Content?

[Travis-W]

Hi Mozzers,

We want to incorporate a 'Dictionary' of terms onto quite a few pages on our site, similar to an FAQ system.

The 'Dictionary' has 285 terms in it, with about 1 sentence of content for each one (approximately 5,000 words total).

The content is unique to our site and not keyword stuffed, but I am unsure what Google will think about us having all this shared content on these pages.

I have a few ideas about how we can build this, but my higher-ups really want the entire dictionary on every page.  Thoughts?

Image of what we're thinking here - http://screencast.com/t/GkhOktwC4I

Thanks!

[Astute-Media]

Hi,

How would it be displayed? Wouldn't it be just as useful to have it open in a new window that the user could keep open? If you need to display 250+ words plus a sentence for each then the user would not be able to see the content they are/were interested in.

You could then have a link to it on each page....

Do your 'higher ups' embrace user experience and how it affects people's browsing? Maybe an education job... Good luck!

Not sure if that helped, but just my opinion.

[Travis-W]

Thanks for the response.

Here is a crude image of what we're thinking - http://screencast.com/t/GkhOktwC4I

The text would be hidden/displayed via javascript, so it would not really affect the user's experience in a negative way.

[Astute-Media]

Ok, i see, it may be more useful to have them as a seperate page, but that is probably a whole different debate and highly subjective.

So what i have looked at is this...

...since there are so many legitimate uses for hiding content with display: none; when creating interactive features, that sites aren't automaticallypenalised for content that is hidden this way (so long as it doesn't look algorithmically spammy).

Google's Webmaster guidelines also make clear that a good practice when using content that is initially legitimately hidden for interactivity purposes is to also include the same content in a  <noscript></code> tag, and Google recommend that if you design and code for users including users with screen readers or javascript disabled, then 9 times out of 10 good relevant search rankings will follow (though their specific advice seems more written for cases where javascript writes new content to the page).</em></p> <blockquote> <p><em><strong>JavaScript:</strong> Place the same content from the JavaScript in a tag. If you use this method, ensure the contents are exactly the same as what’s contained in the JavaScript, and that this content is shown to visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled in their browser.</em></p> </blockquote> <p><em>So, best practice seems pretty clear.</em></p> <p><em><strong>What I can't find out is</strong>, however, the simple factual matter of whether hidden content is indexed by search engines (but with potential penalties if it looks 'spammy'), or, whether it is ignored, or, whether it is indexed but with a lower weighting (<a href="http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/1685/is-content-inside-a-noscript-tag-indexed-by-search-indexes">like <code><noscript></code> content is, apparently</a>).</em></p> <p>That was from another SEO site, what i would say is that Google doesn't 'penalise' for duplicate content so would it be a disaster to try it, see if it is picked up as dupe and then change if necessary?</p></noscript>

[Travis-W]

Another option I am thinking is to include this section in an iFrame, since I know iFrames are not read by search engines.

What do you think about that solution?

[Astute-Media]

We try to never use them for a few reasons, after talking to our dev team here...

Bad For SEO
Linking/Bookmarks
Difficulty with Debugging
No real performance gains

I would really consider a separate page that may well have some real SEO value with a few good terms and explanations on.

Would like to hear other opinions on this...

[Travis-W]

Me too!  Where all my mozzers at?