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I am using WordPress and in my post sidebar I have related posts which may be of interest to the user, however, I also have an excerpt of each article which is normally the first paragraph of the post it is linking to.

For example:

http://musicdune.com/reviews/album-review-ellie-goulding-lights

If you do a Google Search for the first excerpt in the realted posts section from that page you get 4-5 results from my domain, http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Strip+back+the+synths,+fast+beats+and+the+other+pop+elements,+and+you%E2%80%99re+left+with+something+elegant+and+soulful

Is it recommended that I remove the excerpt from the related posts?

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  • To check if you have duplicate content, use webmaster tools from google. google.com/webmasters/tools/?hl=es
    – llazzaro
    Feb 6, 2011 at 0:20
  • I've been wondering similarly, regarding boilerplate site description that appears on every page. I think the tolerance argument has some weight, at least I hope it does :)
    – user7613
    May 18, 2011 at 13:01

3 Answers 3

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That is not duplicate content and having so many results at the top of a search result is a very good thing. There will be some duplicated content on pages and that's alright. Duplicate content only becomes an issue when two or more URLs pull up the exact same content. I wouldn't change a thing.

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Most sites out there will have these partial duplication of content to some degree. If it's not navigation, it's imprint info, colophon or other header/footer text. So I'm sure Google tolerates some level of duplicate content.

It's all about degrees. If there's only a 5~6% overlap in content between pages, then it'll probably be fine. Excerpts aren't that uncommon on the web.

However, I would be sure to mark it up semantically. Even though HTML5 is still in its infancy, and Google probably hasn't begun parsing HTML5 content tags, you want to make your site future-proof by designing your site based on where the search engines are heading.

So that means putting the excerpts in a <blockquote cite="url"> with a <cite> element underneath. And put the entire sidebar in an <aside>. This lets the document parser know that it's not part of the main content. This would give search engines the best chance of understanding that this isn't duplicate content.

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-1

I agree that this is not duplicate content. Plus there is no penalty for Duplicate content. This kind of content is just ignored.

Duplicate content is when you take someone else's work and publish it as your own.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

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    I know this is an old answer, but it is incorrect. There is a penalty for duplicate content when it comes to search engines, it could get you removed from their index. That is a BIG penalty. Taking someone else's work and publishing it as your own is not what is meant when people talk about duplicate content, that is copyright infringement, which is an entirely different thing.
    – Sherwin Flight
    Apr 19, 2012 at 8:09
  • -1 for this answer as well
    – Sherwin Flight
    Apr 19, 2012 at 8:09
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    From Google: In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
    – Sherwin Flight
    Apr 19, 2012 at 8:11

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