: Do search engines treat index pages with excerpts as duplicate content of the pages they link to? I am using WordPress and in my post sidebar I have related posts which may be of interest

@Deb1703797

I agree that this is not duplicate content. Plus there is no penalty for Duplicate content. This kind of content is just ignored.

Duplicate content is when you take someone else's work and publish it as your own.
www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

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@Kevin317

That is not duplicate content and having so many results at the top of a search result is a very good thing. There will be some duplicated content on pages and that's alright. Duplicate content only becomes an issue when two or more URLs pull up the exact same content. I wouldn't change a thing.

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@Shanna517

Most sites out there will have these partial duplication of content to some degree. If it's not navigation, it's imprint info, colophon or other header/footer text. So I'm sure Google tolerates some level of duplicate content.

It's all about degrees. If there's only a 5~6% overlap in content between pages, then it'll probably be fine. Excerpts aren't that uncommon on the web.

However, I would be sure to mark it up semantically. Even though HTML5 is still in its infancy, and Google probably hasn't begun parsing HTML5 content tags, you want to make your site future-proof by designing your site based on where the search engines are heading.

So that means putting the excerpts in a <blockquote cite="url"> with a <cite> element underneath. And put the entire sidebar in an <aside>. This lets the document parser know that it's not part of the main content. This would give search engines the best chance of understanding that this isn't duplicate content.

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