Not necessarily dup. content.

what about duplicate links?

[tonynoriega]

I have a page that uses an image with "hotspots" to pop up additional information about our products...

then right below that i have actual text links to the same pop up window...

is that looked at as duplicate content by google?

[Rocknroll]

I think by hotspots you mean Imagemaps. To my understanding, imagemaps will not be followed by SEs. However, to be sure, I would make sure to add the rotots.txt command in the popups so that the search engines are not allowed to index/access them. I hope this helps!

[g1smd]

Duplicate content is where two different URLs return the same content.

Having two identical links to some other page on a page is never a problem.

Google can follow image maps, but regular links are better.

There is no need for any noindex or nofollow stuff to be added here.

[tonynoriega]

thaks all....

sounds good.

[g1smd]

Just to alter my answer a bit... I would not allow the popup content to be indexed "as is". It is likely not going to have links back to the rest of the site.

How useful is it for visitors to arrive at the "popup page" as a normal page? Probably not very.

In that case get a meta robots noindex tag on it.

[Rocknroll]

Thats what I was refering to g1smd. Meta robots command or robots.txt (if pop-up files are in a separate folder) would make sure that your content is not indexed under different URLs

[tonynoriega]

so if those pages arent indexed, then there is no reason to optimize those pages as far as uniqe title tags, description tags....etc.?

[g1smd]

Yep. They can just be very simply coded pages.

You do need the title tag though, as that is displayed at the top of the browser window.

[AndyA]

What about pages that are in an I-Frame? If that page is loaded within another page via an I-Frame, and is also available and linked to separately elsewhere on the site, is that considered duplicate content? The URL of the page itself is the same in both cases.

The page is on the same site, in another folder, and there are links that allow the contents of the I-Frame only to change, while the main page stays the same. My visitors love it, it's very convenient for them, but I'm not sure if Google does.

[g1smd]

You're overthinking this.

The content in a frame or iframe is not considered to be a part of the page that it in incorporated in to.

It has its own URL and if indexed, will be indexed only under that separate URL.

[AndyA]

Thanks - now I won't spend a couple of hours this evening tearing I-Frames out of multiple pages!