Eliminating need to create near-duplicate content

Question

Ever since I included the tutorial feature on my site, my adsense income consistently went to the bottom every day since the feature was added.

Now I feel the only way I can make money again is to re-create every single URL with extra characters.

For example: I had these URLs:

http://example.com/somepage1
http://example.com/somepage2
http://example.com/category/somepage1
http://example.com/category/somepage2

Now I feel I need to invent these URLs which mimic the output resulting from accessing the above URLs:

http://example.com/tutorial/somepage1
http://example.com/tutorial/somepage2
http://example.com/tutorial/category/somepage1
http://example.com/tutorial/category/somepage2

Therefore it's approximate that:

http://example.com/somepage1 = http://example.com/tutorial/somepage1
http://example.com/somepage2 = http://example.com/tutorial/somepage2
http://example.com/category/somepage1 = http://example.com/tutorial/category/somepage1
http://example.com/category/somepage2 = http://example.com/tutorial/category/somepage2

What I have currently done in an attempt to save a headache is to only use these URLs:

http://example.com/somepage1
http://example.com/somepage2
http://example.com/category/somepage1
http://example.com/category/somepage2

then I use a cookie that determines whether the tutorial is activated or not. Users can easily access tutorial mode with a click of a button.

Somehow I get the impression that the googlebot is so confused it believes I'm "cloaking content" but I'm not sure.

My question then (in the most generic form) is:

Is there another approach I could use to display different content on the same URL that google (and adsense) would gladly accept? I tried using cookie values to define the actual content that appears on screen on a URL, but I don't think adsense likes it?

Answer 1

The same URL should have the same content. As for cloaking that only comes into play if you are presenting one set of content to Googlebot and another set of content to the end users. If you are concerned about the duplicate content aspect of having two URL's which have much the same content you can use the rel="canonical" tag to tell Google that the page is the same as an alternate page. When you do this it tells Google that the actual URL of the page they have just seen is an alternate URL and they use that URL. This is the recommended practice to protect against being penalized for duplicate content.