Duplicate Content Penalty for Include Pages?

[JasperSEO]

Hi,

I have a site that uses merchant reviews as server-side include pages in several categories. For example, on a car site, suppose users could look by year, body style, or geographic region, and wherever the merchant was relevant, it would appear on the pages. These are html pages, not dynamic--the review is actually pasted in on each page. (Obviously, it's not something as numerous as car dealers.)

The good news is, a lot of the site pages are indexed. The bad news is, it's the supplemental index. So I'm in the process of making some changes, but I wondered if having the same merchant review show up on more than one page as an include might be causing a duplicate content penalty.

Thanks.

[Quadrille]

Google looks at all the code that makes up your page.

So if you have bulky includes, site promos, navigation and other stuff, and fairly brief 'unique' copy, then it is highly likely that the pages will not achieve full listing.

If the 'unique' content is 10% of the visble page, then it is probably less than 5% of the code; maybe not enough to impress google.

Consider reducing shared copy.
Consider enlarging the unique stuff.
Consider css to reduce code bloat.

But also check that every page has a unique meta title and description, unique meta keywords (if you use the tag at all), and that they reflect the page content.

Also be sure you have site-wide html navigation (xenu is your friend).

[g1smd]

You could always put the review in an iframe so that it isn't seen, or counted at all. Then you really must have a lot of unique content on each page to make the site fly in the index.

As above, scan the site with Xenu LinkSleuth to see what problems you can find.

[panicbutton]

Er, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. There's no way a user/spider/whatever can tell that a server side include is being used (discounting the use of the ".shtml" extension of course).

[Quadrille]

Granted, the spider does not know that the copy has come from an include - but it knows its the same on each page. And it knows it's bulky. That's the issue here, isn't it?