Page moved to multiple locations - duplicate content question

[rolands]

hi

i've got a page, lets call it services.htm, that lists and described all of my services. i want to move the various subsections of this page onto their own specific page.

The new pages will be using the appropriate text from the services.htm page so i have to be careful with duplicate content. normally i just ise a 301 redirect, but as parts of the content of the services.htm page will now basically be spread over various pages i can't use that.

any suiggestions what my options are?

any advice appreciated, thanks in advance

roland

[Andy Langton]

Presumably you have a page somewhere which describes the services in a more generic way, or at least services as the route you want people to follow to get to the individual services (which may even be the homepage)? If so, redirect there.

[rolands]

hi

thanks for the reply, what my main concern is that i will be recycling the text contained within the services page on the seperate pages.

e.g.

contained with services.htm is 3 sections, widgetsA widgetsB and widgetsC the text in the widgetsA will become a new page widgetsa.htm the text from the paragraph in the widgetb section will become widgetsb.htm etc

i'm worried that i might get a duplicate content penalty when i do this. will you suggestion prevent this do you think?

[Andy Langton]

It's very common for pages to move (which would me the entirety of the text would move). There's no real possibility of duplicate content if one is redirected. if you want 'belt and braces' then you should let Googlebot discover the redirect prior to publishing links to the new pages, but I doubt you need to go as far as that!

[rolands]

that's great thanks very much

[triggerfinger]

From an SEO perspective, it comes down to whether you want to drive traffic to the pages. If you have using widgeta.htm for strictly a user benefit, consider noindex'ing the item pages, keeping services.htm open. Not dupe content issue there.
-t

[rolands]

it was actually for seo so that i could have more specific title tags etc

[Andy Langton]

I actually strongly disagree with using noindex (whether via robots.txt or a meta element) as a solution to duplication problems. It creates additional URLs for evaluation and you stand to lose any link value and ranking signals to excluded URLs. As a last resort, OK, but as a general practice I would try to avoid it.

[triggerfinger]

Technically you could use noindex,follow to keep link juice, if that's a big concern.
If these pages aren't mission critical, I would just open all the pages, and see how aggregate traffic is affected, after say, one month. If the main page drives more traffic than the individuals + main page, revert back. If traffic increases overall, keep monitoring. Also keep monitoring indexation, if one of the individual pages is kicked out, sure fire sign that they won't get traffic.