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I am developing a site and I want to provide a text only version of each page. So that there is an accessible version of each page for disabled users.
However these pages are going to be very similar - except for a few images on the non text version. I am concerned how Google in particular may view these pages, will they be considered as duplicate and if so what is likly to happen?
Also what advice do you have to resolve the problem? I was thinking of using the robot metatag on each of the text only pages to prevent google from indexing them, will this work do you think?
Thanks very much
Don't worry about it. That's not what G refers to as duplicate content.
I wonder if you (or anyone)can tell me how you know this because it has been over a month now since freshbot has visited this domain and it is still not indexed. I am pretty sure there are no other reasons for it not being indexed because it was previously indexed in google until I removed it through the remove url option on my clients request. The only difference sinse trying to get the domain reindexed is the duplicated text only pages.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
<meta name="msnbot" content="noindex">The first entry with the generic name of robots should prevent the bots from indexing it. Both Google and MSN have specific instructions for their bots which may not hurt to have in there for safe measure. I list them in the order you see above.
To address your text only version, you may want to look into other methods of serving just text. You can do this through the use of CSS and JavaScript. You can also do it without the JavaScript and some database scripting. Either way, having duplicate pages there with the same content is not advisable unless of course they are blocked from indexing.
As far as Google is concerned, there are many other things that could be affecting your website. Discussions concerning Google specific questions should be posted in the Google News Forum.
