What are the rules about duplicate pages on...

I think that your question is a very good one. From the blogs and resources that I have read duplicate content can represent a serious threat to a website. I just looked up a post that I read recently from the Google Webmaster Central Blog. They suggested placing a block in the robots.txt file. They were talking about regular and printer versions of information however blocking access in your case might do the trick too?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

 

I saw this google webmaster post too.  I'm reluctant to use robot blocks because I do want the page to be indexed, although it could solve the duplication problem.  I don't have printer versions of my pages (is this bad?), so I'm not worried about that side of things.

Basically, I'm trying to find a lazy way around this - but, as usual with websites and SEO, there isn't one.  Serves me right!

Thanks for your advice.

Hi Jenny, greetings from Australia. If I were you I would do the following to reduce the risk of duplicate content filtering:

1. Chance the page meta title tags
2. Change the h1 and h2 tags (if you're using them)
3. Change the body copy
4. Change the image file names and alt tags
5. Reorder the pages if possible

In short, the more you can change the better. Here's a article that may be of some use.

As I suspected - a re-write...  I might just create a home page for the child domain that points to the parent site.  This'd be quicker in the short term, and could be less confusing for searchers in the long term.

Thanks for your tips!

i don't have a hard and fast answer, but I believe the google help/forum pages might be a good resource to check out also, though I'm sure one of the gooru's here knows the answer to your question.

Thanks for this.  I've checked the google forums and it looks like my pages could be counted as duplicate content, because they are identical.  There's no indication of how different two pages need to be though. I suppose I'd better begin a re-write...