Scenario
There are thousands of products with individual text blocks but also additional information where some paragraphs stay the same for large groups of products.
Examples:
- there is an information for products that are risky activities saying that people under the influence of alcohol will be refused participation.
- there is an information for products that are shows that videos and photos are prohibited.
- there is an information for outdoor events that the event may be cancelled due to rain, thunderstorms etc.
and much more. All this information is given as fulltext and not flags, so I can not show some descriptive icons instead.
It total this information may make up to 50% of total page text length (most times less).
Since this information is relevant for many products this produces (onpage) duplicate content. I wonder if there is any best practice to deal with it? Will search engines (esp. google) even punish these pages?
Approaches I tried:
- Hiding the content by default - will possibly cause UX issues so this solution will unfortunately not work.
- Teasing the content (~30 words) and slide on click (current practice) - UX is okay here but the full text is in page source even if only the first 2 lines are visible by default. Some tools (e.g. seobility) detect duplicate content here and since tabs and accordion are common practice for mobile views I don't think search engines will handle the hidden content differently (see here).
Approaches I have in mind:
- Using some sort of semantical tags - is there anything for this kind of content?
- Structured data - as above - is there anything usable for this kind of content?
- googleon/googleoff tags - seems not to be working according to various tests
So the best way for me would be to tell google (or other search engines) that this content might be duplicate, but it is necessary for the user to see it on every affected page.