Displaying Post Snippets between links - duplicate trouble?

[CainIV]

Hi guys, I have a question for some of the more experienced webmaster here.

I run a large weblog in which I post both factual original articles and rants / raves in my field.

The way my site is structured is really that the index is a splash page, and then the next level categories going in one click (there are 19 in total) each lead to landing pages about a sub topic, and each of those holds about 30-50 further links into the posts.

I am thinking about adding a 'snippet' of text between the links to help the visitor understand more about the link. I am wondering how this might ultimately look to the search engines, and while I do make changes based on visitors more so than search engines, I would prefer not to lose the ranking I have due to duplicate content.

What amount of text from the actual post could be placed under each link to the real post under each of those links without the page looking duplicate? (There is about 1200 words of unique text above the links on the page)

Best,
Todd

[tedster]

I use this approach in several places - a 300 character extract or so to elaborate on the link's content. No duplicate filtering problems have shown up at all, but sometimes the "index page" gets ranked first with the actual content page showing as an indented result.

So I'd say no worries in the situation as you've described it. However, you may get more usable results for your visitors if you can hand craft the summary sentences, rather than just extracting them programmatically from the exact words of the article.

[CainIV]

No duplicate filtering problems have shown up at all, but sometimes the "index page" gets ranked first with the actual content page showing as an indented result.

Nothing wrong with that.:)

I can handcraft them as the site runs on a modified WP engine and I can use the excerpt function.

Gonna take some time!