Duplicate Content Question

[opwdecks]

On the home page of my site I have a read more link that takes you to a different URL with basically the same content, just more of it.

Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/

Read More Link on Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/deckmaintain.htm

I think this may be affecting my seo. Any suggestions on what I should do about this? Should I add a canonical to the home page and/or on the other page?

Both pages are indexed by google.

Thanks for any help or tips.

[opwdecks]

Thanks Keri.

Makes sense to split the article. Keep the top half on the home page and leave the rest of the article on the "read more" link. That way there is not duplicate content and is just a continuation instead of a repeat for the customer.

[KeriMorgret]

Not a direct answer to your question, but from a user's perspective, when I click the "read more" I'm expecting to see more regarding maintaining the exterior wood decking, not the entire intro sales pitch repeated again -- more like the page on How to Clean a Deck that you also have linked from the home page. If you did it that way, you'd only have the paragraph of duplicate content at the above question would be a moot point.

[SteveOllington]

You could get around that easily by having the homepage's content (the content that is duplicated) show up in the same place by using an iframe which displays the content on the actual page, on the homepage. Search engines don't treat iframe content as dupe content, they know it comes from a separate source. However, are you using keywords from that content for your homepage's SEO? Because you would effectively lose that as homepage content.

If you're using that content for the SEO on your homepage and not the other page, you could just use the robots.txt file to noindex, nofollow the other page... then problem solved