Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all,

We have a software product and SEOMOZ tools are currently reporting duplicate content issues in the support section of the website.

This is because we keep several versions of our documentation covering the current version and previous 3-4 versions as well.

There is a fair amount of overlap in the documentation.  When a new version comes out, we simply copy the documentation over, edit it as necessary to address changes and create new pages for the new functionality.

This means there is probably an 80% or so overlap from one version to the next. We were previously blocking Google (using robots.txt) from accessing previous versions of the sofware documentation, but this is obviously not ideal from an SEO perspective.

We're in the process of linking up all the old versions of the documenation to the newest version so we can use rel=canonical to point to the current version.

However, the content isn't all exact duplicates.  Will we be penalized by Google because we're using rel=canonical on pages that aren't actually exact duplicates?

Thanks,

Darren.

As part of our content strategy we are creating an ongoing series of articles to help both our potential buyers and our users learn about our product and improve their knowledge of industry best practices in general.

Internally, we've had some debate as to where we should host this content within our site.  We've identified two approaches:

1. Series of blog posts
2. Dedicated knowledge section of the website

If we go with the first approach, we would created a dedicated section that indexed all the blog posts.  If we went with the second, we'd create blog posts for each of the articles announcing their addition.

Is there any difference, SEO wise with the two approaches?  What would you recommend?

Thanks,

Darren.