What is the best way to manage industry required duplicate Important Safety Information (ISI) content on every page of a site?

[MedThinkCommunications]

Hello SEOmozzer!

I have recently joined a large pharmaceutical marketing company as our head SEO guru, and I've encountered a duplicate content related issue here that I'd like some help on.

Because there is so much red tape in the pharmaceutical industry, there are A LOT of limitations on website content, medication and drug claims, etc.  Because of this, it is required to have Important Safety Information (ISI) clearly stated on every page of the client's website (including the homepage).  The information is generally pretty lengthy, and in some cases is longer than the non-ISI content on each page. Here is an example:  http://www.xifaxan.com/

All content under the ISI header is required on each page.   My questions are:

1. How will this duplicated content on each page affect our on-page optimization scores in the eyes of search engines?  Is Google seeing this simply as duplicated content on every page, or are they "smart" enough to understand that because it is a drug website, this is industry standard (and required)?

2. Aside from creating more meaty, non-ISI content for the site, are there any other suggestions you have for handling this potentially harmful SEO situation?

And in case you were going to suggest it, we cannot simply have an image of the content, as it may not be visible by all internet users. We've already looked into that

Thanks in advance!

Dylan

[samfiora]

Can you get away with the image if you add an audio link for the ISI?  Another option might be an iframe.

[RyanKent]

Based on your message, I presume something along the lines of a text link READ THIS IMPORTANT LEGAL INFORMATION which links to a page with the disclaimer would not work?

In that case, understand web pages already have duplicate content. Your header, footer and sidebar are often duplicated throughout the site. This disclaimer would add to that duplicate content. It should not cause a problem but some suggestion would be:

• add it to the bottom of the page, the lower the better.

• try to make your main content as rich as possible

• within your legal requirements, make the disclaimer text as small and less visible as possible. For example, instead of using black colored text can you lighten it a bit to silver or grey?

I would only consider alternate approaches if there was a problem indexing or ranking your pages and it was determined the disclaimer was a factor. In that case, you could consider using an iframe to present the disclaimer, but again, this is just one possible solution and I hate to suggest it as most likely it is not the best solution.