: SEO & Reordering of duplicate content I am currently working on a website, and the designer wants a menu that is setup like this: Toplevel1 Toplevel2 submenu1 submenu2 submenu3 Toplevel3 Toplevel4

@Candy875

Does this hurt SEO? They are all gonna have different URLS


The short answer is yes, especially if there are many menus and sub-menus. Since all your pages will have a different URL, but nearly same content, they will be considered as near duplicate content (that is low value/quality for the end user).

The solution is simple, pick one URL and use rel="canonical" in all other pages with this URL and you will be safe.

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@Jamie184

While Google can be quite forgiving, the Google Scholar experience and citations allows Google to recognize this scenario natively. This means that content is not read/understood in a linear fashion any more (since 2008) and that similar chunks of data are easily compared between pages and sites. While any negative effect might be argued, I do know that pages, paragraphs, sentences, and even phrases can be compared to easily recognize reordered content. After-all this was a trick used by content spammers years ago.

So I would expect that this would be considered duplicate content. Depending upon the site size you will likely experience an effect at the least. Smaller sites are not often not penalized as a target, but an algorithm will probably effect your ability to reach searchers.

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