'Printable Pages' considered duplication?

[Glen_Murphy]

Hi,

Just a query regarding the design of a site. If you offer users a printable version of a webpage, which links to a stripped down version of the page without the graphics but with the same content, is it considered a duplication by Google?

I was just thinking that a site with a strong editorial focus which hundreds of articles that all link to a printed version, may be considered duplication as a whole.

[Lorel]

Just put a meta tag with noindex,nofollow on the printable page.

[Tinus]

And put all printable pages in a separate map which you close for SE in robot.txt

[2004mark]

Printable pages (in my opinion) are duplicate pages, I would also be as bold as to say that Google would see them as duplicate content as well.

However, why does this matter? Google will index one of the pages, most likely the 'screen page' if it's first in the directory structure or linked to from index pages.

If content is copied then Google will not penalise all pages, it will simply not list the 'copied' pages in it's index, the original SHOULD still be there as before.

[lammert]

Printable pages are counted as duplicate content. One solution is to add the robots noindex tag as mentioned here above. Another way is to use CSS media types on the original page and delete the printable version from your site.

Use a <style type="text/css" media="screen"> CSS definition for the way the page should look at the screen, and a <style type="text/css" media="print"> for the print layout. In this case you will not only solve the problem of duplicate content, but also those people that print the screen version of the page will get a proper printout.

More media types than screen and printer are supported and in this way you can also make your site accessible to handheld users, people using Braille devices etc.