Advice on Duplicate Page Content

[jsmoz]

We have many pages on our website and they all have the same template (we use a CMS) and at the code level, they are 90% the same. But the page content, title, meta description, and image used are different for all of them.

For example -

http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs

We have many such pages.

Does Google look at them all as duplicate page content? If yes, how do we deal with this?

[EGOL]

Google knows how to separate the template of the site from the content.   So you have nothing to worry about if most of the code on your pages is the same code that is used on every other page.

I looked at your two sample pages and saw a few things that would concern me...

This page had very little content.  If you have lots of pages with such a tiny amount of content you could have Panda problems.

http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs

You also have pages like this....

http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs-view

These have very little content.

I have a site with lots of printable content that is mainly images placed in .pdf documents to control the scale of the printing and the look of the printed page.  The pages used to present them to visitors and the pdf documents were all thin content and my site had a Panda problem.   That cause the rankings of every page on the site to fall and really damaged my traffic.  I solved that by noindexing the html pages and applying rel=canonical to the pdf files using .htacess.

I can't say if this will happen to you but I would be uncomfortable if I had a site with such little content on its pages.

[Everett]

Hello Sudhir,

Those two pages would not be seen as duplicates. Google is very capable of separating the template from the content.

On a side note, you should look into getting the name of the page/game into the breadcrumb, though it doesn't have to be linked like the previous two pages in the path. For example:

You are here: Home --> Common --> Find Easter Eggs

Allowing visitors to review and rate the games would provide useful, keyword-rich, natural content on an otherwise content-sparse page. Once reviews/ratings are implemented you could also use Schema.org markup to enhance your search engine results by showing star ratings next to each game.

Good luck!

[EGOL]

Thank you, Everett,

Nice to see you posting in Q&A.

Look forward to seeing you regularly.

[jsmoz]

EGOL, Everett,

Thank you both for your very useful suggestions.  Sounds like we should do something similar to our PDF documents to represent them as the actual/canonical content on the page.   And we'll look at our CMS to see how we might implement the unlinked page name in the breadcrumb.   We have done some work already in adding structured data with schemas (including aggregate ratings), so that is hopefully yielding some results already.

However, after an encouraging traffic spike that seemed to indicate that we were on the right track, we saw a very worrisome dip last month.... which then led to a lot of worried hand wringing about Panda.

So these suggestions are very helpful ; thanks again and we'll try them out!