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Thank you for the response Marie. My main concern at the moment is seo because the content was flagged as duplicate in MOZ Crawl Diagnostics, and I want to avoid being penalized for duplicate content. Still, I appreciate the comments on performance vs. seo. Thanks again.

Hello Dear MOZers,

Having duplicate content issues and I'd like some opinions on how best to deal with this problem.

Background: I run a website for a cosmetic surgeon in which the most valuable content area is the section of before/after photos of our patients. We have 200+ pages (one patient per page) and each page has a 'description' block of text and a handful of before and after photos. Photos are labeled with very similar labels patient-to-patient ("before surgery", "after surgery", "during surgery" etc). Currently, each page has a unique rel=canonical tag. But MOZ Crawl Diagnostics has found these pages to be duplicate content of each other. For example, using a 'similar page checker' two of these pages were found to be 97% similar.

As far as I understand there are a few ways to deal with this, and I'd like to get your opinions on the best course.

1. Add 150+ more words to each description text block

2. Prevent indexing of patient pages with robots.txt

3. Set the rel=canonical for each patient page to the main gallery page

4. Any other options or suggestions?

Please keep in mind that this is our most valuable content, so I would be reluctant to make major structural changes, or changes that would result in any decrease in traffic to these pages.

Thank you folks,

Ethan