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Suppose there is a website for my company named "Seven Season" which manufactures T-Shirts. In the website for this company, I have the following pages:

Home
About us
Our Products
Disclaimer
Contact Us

All pages have unique content.

But following content is the same in each link:

  1. Logo and name of the company (i.e., "Seven Season")
  2. Today's date
  3. Front image slide show
  4. Scrolled company slogan
  5. Navigation menu having links of: Home, About us, Our Products, Disclaimer, Contact Us

I want to confirm that:

  1. Because of above 5 content items which are the same on each page, would I be penalized for duplicate content?
  2. Are all these repeated items treated as duplicate content by search engines?
  3. If these are considered to be duplicate content, then if I mention the company name as "Seven Season" in my "Home" page, then "Six Season" in my "About Us" page, and then "Five Season" in my "Product" page...is this alternative wise according to SEO?
  4. To provide unique content, should I add different menu options in different pages?
  5. Should I mention different dates as Today's date in each page?
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3 Answers 3

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I don't think the items in your question would result in a penalty from duplicate content because they're very common for sites.

The only questionable one might be the slideshow if it's very textually-based and not very complex, since Google will crawl some JavaScript code. One thing you might consider is to place the slideshow in an iframe with a canonical link to let Google know it should only be indexed for that link's URL and not each page.

I would certainly not suggest any of the rest of the things you're asking about, and would simply make sure the rest of the content is unique from page to page.

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  • Respected Dan Sir, Thank you very much. Your answer is helpful for me. Thant means some contents which are bound to same in every page is not treated as duplicate. But how search engine know that which items are bound to same and which items are bound to unique in each page. Please suggest
    – SSRB
    Jun 22, 2013 at 6:08
  • You're welcome, glad it helped. Search engines like Google have complex algorithms that weigh how similar pages are, and take into consideration the items you listed because they are common. As long as majority of HTML content is different from page to page, I would not be concerned. If your pages look indistinguishable however, then you should add unique content. See this from Google for more: Duplicate Content
    – dan ♦
    Jun 22, 2013 at 16:11
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It is reasonably assumed that when talking about duplicate content, areas of the page such as the logo, the navigation, the sidebars, ads, footers, etc, are not areas of the page to worry about duplication. The area to worry about is the main body of the page, where unique content for each page would be.

Here is a great video from moz.org about duplicate content. At the beginning of the video Rand covers this exact subject.

(moz.org is well respected authority in the field of SEO)

Here is a video by Matt Cutts from Google on the reason they don't have a markup for boilerplate (default content site-wide) content. The reason being their algorithm should spot what types of content is boilerplate, such as navigation menus etc.

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  • Respected Mobot sir thank you very much. Your answer is helpful. Also if you permit me then please visit a site developed by me and suggest any seo issue. the site is www.bidecabhanjanagar.com . I don't know it is right or wrong to mention a site name . If not then sorry. Please suggest.
    – SSRB
    Jun 22, 2013 at 6:21
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i) Because of above 5 content items which are the same in each link, would I be penalized for duplicate content?

No, you wouldn't.

ii)Are all these repeated items treated as duplicate content by search engines?

No, they aren't.

iii) If these are considered to be duplicate content, then If I mention the company name as "Seven Season" in my "Home" page, then "Six Season" in my "About Us" page, and then "Five Season" in my "Product" page...is this alternative wise according to SEO?

Look for the answer for the previous answer.

iv) To provide unique content. should I add different menu options in different pages?

There is no need to do it.

v) Should I mention different dates as Today's date in each page?

No, you should not.

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  • Thank you respected Marian Sir thank you very much. Your answer is very much helpful. Please also suggest any method to say search engine that a particular item is bound to same in each page. How Search engine know that which items are bound to same in each page.
    – SSRB
    Jun 22, 2013 at 6:17
  • You have no need to say Search Engines about site-wide elements. They will understand it by themselves. One thing - site-wide elements should no occupy more than unique elements.
    – Marian Popovych
    Jun 23, 2013 at 18:20

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