Presenting your own content in two different ways

Will Google penalize as duplicate content?

[directrix]

My site consists of a collection of widgets. Currently, each page contains ten widgets, so page 1 covers widgets 1-10, page 2 widgets 11-20, and so on, for several hundred widgets.

In addition to this format, I'd now like to give each widget its own dedicated page. This will make it easier to offer such features as "Go to a random widget." So I will have several hundred new pages that present existing content in a new format

Will Google penalize this? Even if I am duplicating my own content?

[Quadrille]

Of course. How hard could it be? ;)

You'll lose sales anyway, as your visitors will soon get bored with wading through identical padding to reach what they want.

Remember SEO 101 "First, plan your site to be the best for human visitors. Then think about SEO."

Google hates duplication with a passion; better to be found with 10 useful pages than hidden with 100 useless ones :)

Find a way of combining widgets that is logical, and maximises common factors, rather than do it by numbers.

For example, you may have 3 stereo widgets, 17 soft fabric widgets, 9 aspirin-free widgets. Use the qualities of your stock to bring interesting pages - and good seo - to your site.

Some items may be in a class of their own - so they can have their own page, provided you can find interesting things to say about them. Google looks at your whole page code - so many of your pages will be similar before you start, with the same header, footer, navigation etc., etc. if the 'unique' content is just a paragraph or two, Google will see no reason to list them all.

[idolw]

We have lots of widgets on our website. They can be put into many categories:
- cheap/medium-priced/luxury widgets;
- widgets by colour;
- widgets by whatever specific to your niche.

Just make a page for each widget and make lists of links to each widget's page according to the category.

I cannot believe it could hurt as we just do it for the user. Some our users search for cheap widgets and some will consider nothing but luxury widgets. We must be able to give them right presentation and categorisation of the products we sell.

It is important not to repeat all information everywhere, though...

[directrix]

Thanks Quadrille and idolw, I was afraid that would be the consensus!

My problem is that I decided upon 10 widgets per page 3.5 years ago when I first created the site. The site has been doing well in Google, so I am reluctant to make any radical design changes for fear of ending up in the sandbox, or similar.

However, I may bite the bullet and embark on a complete redesign. The site is non-commercial (the "widgets" are not for sale!), so at least I need not fear a loss of income.

Thanks for the advice.

One past point... would placing noindex on the new pages (possibly combined with nofollow on the links from the old pages to the new) prevent Google from seeing either the new or the old pages as duplicates? Not that I'm planning to do that.

[directrix]

Sorry, in the final paragraph, that should have read, One last point... .

Reading the Google ignores the meta robots noindex tag [webmasterworld.com] thread, it seems relying upon noindex and/or nofollow for this purpose would be unwise.

[GoWFB_SEO]

you need to know that Google does not penalize duplicate content, but it does filter out a page on which the content is similiar to that of another page.