Duplicate page content

[haydennz]

I have a website which "houses" five different and completely separate departments, so the content is separated by subfolders. e.g. domain.com/department1 domain.com/department2 etc. and each have their own individual top navigation menus.

There is an "About Us" section for each department which has about 6 subpages (Work for us, What we do, Awards etc.)  but the problem is that the content for each department is exactly the same. The only difference is the navigation menu and the breadcrumbs. This isn't ideal as a change to one page means having to make the change to all 5 and from an SEO perspective it's duplicate content x5 (apart from the Nav).

One solution I can see is to have the "About Us" section moved to the root level (domain.com/about-us) and have a generic nav, possibly with the department names on it. The only problem with this is that it disrupts the user journey if they are forced away from the department that they're chosen.

Basically i'm looking for suggestions or examples of other sites that have got around this problem, I need inspiration!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[haydennz]

Thanks for the response.

1. No point in creating unique content as it's all the same thing.

2. I hadn't thought of canonical tags, good idea.

3. That's the idea that i'm siding with. I'm just concenred that some users will have trouble getting back to the department that they were in before they clicked "About Us".

[ResslerMotors]

Seems to me that you have a few easy options.

1. Write unique content for all of the pages.

2. Use "canonical tags" to tell the bots which is the original source

3. Use a standard page for all of the different departments