Artist Bios on Multiple Pages: Duplicate Content or not?

[sbaylor]

I am currently working on an eComm site for a company that sells art prints. On each print's page, there is a bio about the artist followed by a couple of paragraphs about the print.

My concern is that some artists have hundreds of prints on this site, and the bio is reprinted on every page,which makes sense from a usability standpoint, but I am concerned that it will trigger a duplicate content penalty from Google.

Some people are trying to convince me that Google won't penalize for this content, since the intent is not to game the SERPs. However, I'm not confident that this isn't being penalized already, or that it won't be in the near future.

Because it is just a section of text that is duplicated, but the rest of the text on each page is original, I can't use the rel=canonical tag. I've thought about putting each artist bio into a graphic, but that is a huge undertaking, and not the most elegant solution.

Could I put the bio on a separate page with only the artist's info and then place that data on each print page using an <iframe>and then put a noindex,nofollow in the robots.txt file?</p> <p>Is there a better solution?  Is this effort even necessary?</p> <p>Thoughts?</p></iframe>

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Darin,

Let me add my 2 cents:

If it makes sense from a usuability standpoint to have the author bio on the page, then by all means leave it there.

What's most important, from a search engine point of view, is that the unique content on the page is the most important.

This means placing the paragraphs about the print description front and center on the page. Since Panda, Google seems to treat page content using more of a Reasonable Surfer model in a similar manner as they handle links. That is, the higher up and more prominent the content, the more likely that weighs into their calculations to what the page is "about."

Matt Cutts has previously said it only takes 2-3 sentences to make a page unique, but personally I think closer to a couple hundred words is a safer number.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[sbaylor]

The <iframe>makes the most sense for this company's requirements. Do I need to do anything regarding noindex or nofollow if we create a dedicated page for each artist's bio and then pull the bio into the <iframe> on each print's page?  Or does simply pulling that data via the iframe from the original "source" (that being the proposed artist bio page) eliminate the duplicate content concern?</p></iframe>

[sbaylor]

Well, according to this post from a Google employee on a Google forum, Google ignores the noindex or nofollow in an <iframe>:</p> <p>http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/tSHq764AA0A</p> <p>He also references this link on the robots.txt file:</p> <p>http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710</p></iframe>

[sbaylor]

Chad, while posting a link instead of the dupe content makes sense logically, it dramatically reduces the amount of content on the page, so from a usability standpoint to the visitor (as well as the directive of the site owner), the bios need to remain on each print's page.

[MoosaHemani]

If the artist bio is not the major content on the page and there is other content available which is unique so there are less chances that Google will take this in to play but you never know Google... so it’s better to play safe.

Now if you want to play safe you have two choices, either to have a dedicated page for each artist and on that painting’s page just put the clickable image of the article that will take people to the artist’s bio page (not really helpful from conversion point of view)

The other idea is to use the iframe to show the content on each page and this way Google will count that a different page.

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

Why can't you just have a link to a artist bio page.

For example:

Click to read: John Doe's  bio 

This seems to solve the issue of usability as well as the issue with duplicate content. Just a suggestions. Learning more myself.

[StreamlineMetrics]

I was actually going to suggest putting the artist's info into a graphic before I finished reading your post. If that is going to be too much of an undertaking, then yes, an iframe would be a reasonable solution. Instead of using robots.txt, I'd suggest putting the noindex tag into the head of the iframed content.