Does Printer Friendly Version = Duplicate Content Penalty?

[rfontaine]

If you have a website, such as news site, that has tons of content in HTML and you would like to make printer-friendly-versions of all these news articles, do you think certain search engines may penalize the site for dup content?

[rfontaine]

anybody?

[Elijah]

You could just use a noindex meta tag on the printable pages.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

[techstyled]

Disclaimer: I'm a newb

I _think_ that you get penalized for having duplicate content when you have duplicate content. IOW, if you intend to put the same basic content in just a more print friendly format, I think you will be penalized.

I also _think_ the preferred method for doing this is by providing a CSS stylesheet change which would _not_ be a different page per se.

Ask in the CSS forum if you need to know how to do this.

[msgraph]

Site being penalized? unlikely. It is usually a matter of one page being chosen over the other

Most of the time search engines do a decent job of listing the "real" page instead of the printer-friendly page.

But like Elijah said, just be safe and block the robots to them.

[sun818]

It is also better for your users. Any time I visit certain forums, I notice several different versions of the same post: 1) forum page, robot friendly page, printer friendly page, and finally the reply box in the text. Only one page needs to be in the index, preferably the robot friendly page. Every other version needs to be blocked from the search engines.

[Brett_Tabke]

Site being penalized? unlikely. It is usually a matter of one page being chosen over the other

and that is the bottom line on the Dupe Content hysteria of 2005.

[le_gber]

rfontaine,

how about using a specific stylesheet for print and avoid printer friendly pages altogether?