Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content

[J_Sinclair]

Hi,

I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another.

For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this.

One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content.

Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.

[J_Sinclair]

Thanks for the response Alan, really helpful to get another persons opinion.

We're thinking that all  content detail needs to presented on ONE url regardless of the section that you arrive to it from and any inline content reveals will need to be unique to that section – so the content should be more relevant

[AlanBleiweiss]

Very good question - it's a tricky issue for sure.

The best way to address this is if there is enough content for any of the "common" aspects where you can justify having a stand-alone page devoted to that aspect, you can then link to that single page from multiple other pages.  Proper implementation would be to have a very brief reference to that on each of the other pages (thus reducing the volume of duplication) along with that link for people to learn more information about that.

Other than that, it really comes down to the total weight of unique content vs. duplicate content. I don't know what secret formula Google has for percentage of duplication, let alone how that gets weighed against all the other signals to consider.  So the above approach is what I recommend to clients and they have good results with it.