Will I have duplicate content on my own website?

[Gael_Regnault]

Hello Moz community, We are an agency providing services to various industries, and among them the hair salon industry. On our website, we have our different service pages in the main menu, as usual. These service pages are general information and apply to any industry.We also have a page on the website that is only intended for the hair salon industry. On this page, we would like to link new service pages: they will be the same services as our “general” services, but specialized for hair salons. My questions relate to duplicate content:

1. Do we have to make the new individual service pages for hair salons with completely different text, even though it’s the same service, in order to avoid having duplicate content?
2. Can we just change a few words from the “general service” page to specifically target hair salons, and somehow avoid Google seeing it as duplicate content?

Reminder that these pages will be internal links inside of the hair salon industry page. Thank you in advance for your answers, Gaël

[Chris.Menke]

Gael,

The rule is pretty simple here- there's really no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty" that will hurt your entire site. The question is--do you want those pages with content similar to the original to rank equally to the original page? If so, each page will have to be very unique and build its own expertise, authority and trust (quality content, inbound links, local seo).

While there may not be a penalty for content duplicated on your site, google does have a threshold as to what it calls original content and just changing a few words on the page will not meet those requirements. You really should start from scratch and rethink the copy on each page if you're thinking you want these pages to rank well in the future.