Duplicate content on the same page--is this an issue?

[nicole.healthline]

We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen.

I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great).

Thank you in advance.

[Andropenis_Australia]

You may or may not have issues, but the general consensus is that if you place the rel canonical tag to the mobile page you should be ok, perhaps try it on one or two pages and then leave it for a month or so and watch your ranking trends.....

Also you could try and ask this question on the G webmaster forum to try and get a reply from a G employee.

Best of luck for today and forevermore!