"Printable" pages: need help

Do "printable versions" = duplicate content?

[hommealone]

I've designed "printable versions" of several pages on my site (price lists, product information, etc). They're basically just stripped down versions in black & white, with minimal graphics and no navigation elements. All of the text is the same.

But now I've begun to worry: might search engines see these as "duplicate content" pages, and penalize my site for that?

If so, what options do I have for pages like this that will allow me to avoid penalization?

[bcolflesh]

Disallow the printable pages in your robots.txt - add the NO FOLLOW, NO INDEX tag just to be sure.

[photon]

You could also use CSS for the same effect, without creating separate pages. That way you'd never have to worry about the "pairs" being out of sync.

[Mark_A]

or use one page and css media print to make parts of the full page dissapear or change format when sent to a printer.

Search in here for more or on the wider net, someone in here pointed me at this and I have used it a lot since, it can make a very elegant solution.

[Mark_A]

photon you beat me to it :-)

[hommealone]

Thanks folks! So, am I right in thinking that without doing these things, I might be penalized? Follow up questions:

bcolflesh: I'll do what you said about adding the pages to my robot.txt. When you said:

add the NO FOLLOW, NO INDEX tag just to be sure.

you mean in the head of the page itself, right? I'm not exactly sure how to do that; can you be more specific? Thanks!

Regarding CSS solutions: Are you saying that I would then have only one page, instead of two? Hmmm... I'm very new at using css - I've only just started to use a style sheet for text, hyperlinks, and now just a bit for table formatting. Can anyone direct me to a place to find good explanations or tutorials for how to make "printable version" pages using css?

[bcolflesh]

Use the CSS solution mentioned above if you are already familiar w/CSS:

[****.com...]

[photon]

Yep, you apply a separate stylesheet to the same page to create a printable version.

Not sure why the above web site has fallen out of favor here, but here's another site that has info about "print" stylesheets:

[meyerweb.com...]

[Mark_A]

hommealone you asked "Are you saying that I would then have only one page, instead of two? "

Yes, design the one page with dual purposes in mind, it takes a little thinking about when you do it the first time, after that it becomes very easy and even an elegant and simple solution.

For items you want on screen but not on print you could use the CLASS= element of its code to name it something like "screen"

Then, using the example perhaps of an image which makes up the right hand end of a header area (and might also be a width shim [2]) which may cause your contents to be wider than a US letter or European A4 printed page

<IMG SRC="dir/imagename.jpg" WIDTH="100" HEIGHT="50" BORDER="0" ALT="alternative text" CLASS="screen">

Then in your style sheet make something like the following entry

@media print {.screen {display: none;}
}

Which means when its being sent to a printer .. dont display elements classed as "screen"

Using that method you can further make sets of navigation links on the left of a page dissapear from a printed page so your contents from the right could move to the left to fit better in a portrait page.

Using it with embellishments you could make a distinct copyright text appear on a printed page which might be stronger than on your web page when viewed on screen. [But see note 3]

Or perhaps remove a dark background colour from an element and change the colour of light text contained in it to dark text to work better on a printed page.

Hope that helps you a bit more.

Notes:

[1] I am still using tables on most of these types of pages today. You could do it in a more up to date way using css for layout but starting from where you seem to be now that *may* be a bigger step to learn and you *may* find more cross browser compatibility issues you have to work your way through.

[2] an image used as a "shim" (people may use other spellings but from engineering I think a spacer is spelled that way) an image used in part to control the minium width of a table.

[3] I personally am *not* tempted to put anthing that may be construed as keyword stuffing into anything not set to display on screen as this may be viewed by a manual reviewer of your site or perhaps even a machine reviewer (as it would not be to hard to tie together a class set to hidden from a css file and contents marked as class hidden :-) it may be seen as cloaking and earn you or your client a manual penalty which you or they may not like :-)