Same text posted on one page in a few different versions

[fargo1999]

I have a blog that requires posting the same text/article (one text has about 500-1000 words) on one page a few times. It's like "live text editing/revising."

Actually, the text isn't EXACTLY the same -- first post is a rough draft, then it is edited/revised and posted again. After that it's one more time corrected and the final copy is posted as the last message. So there are 3-5 copies of almost the same text and each only slightly differs from one another.

Will Google penalize for such "duplicate" content on the same page? Will it be harder to rank on such page?

[tedster]

I've never seen anything like this, so it's hard to say - but there's certainly a chance for trouble. It might fit the profile for autoegenerated text, it might also trip the over-optimization flag.

It sounds really strange for the visitors, too. Are you sure the application is configured correctly? I can't see why anyone would want various versions all to be made live.

[fargo1999]

Yes I think it's configured correctly. It is an educational blog.

Students posts their articles and ask us to correct it for grammatical mistakes, word usage, content etc. So let's say student writes this sentence:

"I like rading books and walking in park."

Then I post a corrected sentence:

"I like reading books and walking in the park."

Then student asks if this sentence would be good too:

"I like to read books and to walk in the park."

Then I reply yes, but he could also consider:

"I like reading and walking."

etc.

Students usually posts the whole story/essay so you can imagine there would be a lot of duplicate content. But in order to show the learning process and from usability point of view, I haven't come up with a better way than to show all messages. But then Google may think it's spamming or something..

So maybe there's a better idea after all? One option would be to delete first drafts and only leave the final draft, but then I'm sure it would not be good for visitors and the site's purpose would be broken as then students wouldn't have a chance to learn anything from it.

[tedster]

It's probably better, then, to have it all on one page. Having different versions indexed on different URLs would definitely be problematic.

I am thinking of one other approach that would avoid any of those issues. Only publish the original version on the main url, but still have all the edits visible in the same window - from an iframe. Then use a noindex robots meta (or even a robots.txt exclusion) for the url that is in the iframe.

[fargo1999]

That may be a good idea with iframe (or possibly javascript "spoiler").. I'll see if it's that easy to implement though ;), thanks.

[Robert Charlton]

fargo1999 - As I was reading this thread, my thought was the same as tedster's initial comment... to have it all on one page.

I'm having a conceptual problem, though, about what is is that you want to be ranking. Using your example, "I like rading books and walking in park" and 500-1000 more words on the topic, it's not clear that ranking on the example being worked on is itself going to be very helpful. You're probably not going to rank on rading/raiding/reading books or on walking in the park etc, nor do I think that should be your goal.

What you might want to rank on, I'm thinking, is an optimized description of, say, a step in your lesson plan that might introduce your example. I'm just guessing here, of course, about what your goals are... but I trust you see where I'm coming from.

I don't know whether you include this kind of pedagogical material with each example. If you do, it might make sense to have just this on the page, and then put both the example and the discussion in an iframe. Again, it completely depends on your goals.