: How to Keep SEO Score from Dropping with Duplicate Content Possible Duplicate: What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site? I'm hoping that

@Welton855

Generally speaking, our (I work at Google on web-search) algorithms are really good at recognizing that kind of duplication and treating it appropriately. You don't need to do anything special in a case like that. In particular, you might see that only one of the pages that contains the exact same content is showing in the search results (that's not a penalty, it just helps with the user-experience since it doesn't make sense to show the same content multiple times in the search results).

If you wanted to exclude certain content within a page from being indexed (and again, in most cases you don't need to worry about this!), one way you could do it is to include that content via an iframe, and to use the robots.txt file to prevent crawling of that iframe'd content. That way, search engines will be able to crawl the page, but won't be able to fetch the content that's embedded via iframe. Since our systems are generally really good at handling duplicate parts of content like that, personally I wouldn't bother doing that, but in the end, it's up to you.

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@Caterina187

You could look into "cross-domain canonical links," and this Spotted Panda article touches on this topic in the fourth bullet point in 'on-page' factors.

In short (and this changes so quickly I could be mistaken), you probably won't be 'penalized' (as in harmed), but search engines (read as: Google) try not to show duplicate content in SERPs.

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@Phylliss660

It is well-known to search engines that onsite - search result pages contain snippets of the content that is searched for.

But:

I would recommend you set the values "noindex,follow" for your robot-tag on your dynamically created search result pages.


meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"


This way the results don't accidentally compete with your main content and any search engine will still follow all links and spider your site. The robots tag is known to all bots.

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@Rivera981

Short Answer:
No, there's no way to markup a piece of content on a page that blocks or excludes that content from being crawled/indexed.

Longer Answer:
I think you're being overly concerned about duplicate content and how it is determined for the purposes of SEO. In the eyes of the search engines, duplicate content refers to


"substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either
completely match other content or are appreciably similar".


Specifically, in your case, you have less to worry about because you are legitimately trying to add consumer value by providing information about each cruise. This piece from Google explains it well:


Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.


So, unless those cruise line descriptions make up the substantive part of the content you have little to worry about.

There's more information on understanding and managing duplicate content here: support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

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