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I have a website which talks about cars and motorcycles. Once in, the user can choose wether to browse the cars section or the motorcycles section. Once chosen his section, the url will have a /section/ part in it.

The page requests are always the same. The difference is just about the content.

The structure of a common page is the following:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+    SLIDER WITH PHOTOS   +
+  AND SMALL DESCRIPTION  +
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

       PAGE CONTENT

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If i am browsing the car section, the slider will be populated with car photos and some text about car. Else, if i am browsing the motorcycles section, some bikes with some text will populate the slider.

EXAMPLE

Let's take as example the news page. If i am browsing the cars section, my URL will be mywebsite.com/cars/news. Else, if i am browsing the motorcycles section, the url will be mywebsite.com/motorcycles/news.

Here is the trick! My website in both situations will run the script news.php. Different news will be displayed, because basing on URL, different posts will be fetched from db.

This means, mywebsite.com/cars/news and mywebsite.com/motorcycles/news will not generate duplicate content, because the content delivered is totally different.

THE PROBLEM

Let's take as example the about us page. In this page i show information about the website. These information are the same wether i am browsing the car section or the motorcycles section.

This means, if i visit mywebsite.com/cars/about-us or mywebsite.com/motorcycles/about-us the slider part (and some other little menus) will be slightly different, having different pictures and descriptions, but the page content will be exactly the same.

THE QUESTIONS

  1. Being (in the about-us page example) 90% of the page identical, will crawlers see it as duplicate content (and penalize me)? More in general, what crawlers consider as duplicated content are two identical pages or two ALMOST identical pages?
  2. Should I decide which one is the best version and put rel="canonical" in it?

NOTE: I would prefer not removing /section/ from my URLS, for now.

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1 Answer 1

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  1. Google might consider a page as duplicate if it finds the entire content of a web page in other web page and in order to solve this issue we have to use rel=canonical attribute.

  2. Yes! You should use rel="canonical" in the <head> section of mywebsite.com/cars/about-us or mywebsite.com/motorcycles/about-us.

For example:

If you put

<link rel="canonical" href="mywebsite.com/cars/about-us"/>

in the <head> section of mywebsite.com/motorcycles/about-us it will tell Google to consider mywebsite.com/cars/about-us page instead of considering both the pages.

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