Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages

[jasonwdexter]

Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?

[coneh34d]

It is very important that you ensure the content is unique. Make sure it passes a test like Copyscape before publishing.

The primary reason is this. Duplicate content will not get Indexed. All that is necessary is to have the content written really well either by yourself or a service like Textbroker.com.

I run into this sort of thing all of the time for my clients that offer the same service in multiple cities. If you just churn out similar content, Google will not Index it. Of course, if its not in the Index, it isn't getting found.

Cheers!

[jasonwdexter]

Just as I thought. I just couldn't get my head around and I suggested to the client that we write the copy to be unique, obviously, but I just wondered if there was any other way.

Thanks buddy

[BedeFahey]

Is there a reason you can't use one page for "Internal Decorating" and have users end up on that page no matter whether they arrive via Residential or Commercial?