Duplicate content on my own site?

[DavidO]

Duplicate content fears have been exagerrated but duplicate content on your own site can actually get you penalized.

So how do you deal with this scenario:

I have an articles directory page with a list of over 100 keyword-rich titles. Each title is a link to the article page where the title and full article are published.

I never stopped to think about it but could posting all these titles twice be duplicate content?

What made me think about this is that now I want to redo my articles page in a blog format. That is, I'll have the title followed by the first few lines followed by a "read more" link to the full article.

That's a lot of keyword-rich content repeated on two different pages. But I know it's a common format.

What are the implications of this?

[edgray]

Originally Posted by DavidO

Duplicate content fears have been exagerrated but duplicate content on your own site can actually get you penalized.

This is a big myth - there is no duplicate content penalty. Matt Cutts has stated this himself. What happens is that when there is duplicate content on one site, Google will just index one instance of this. But this won't affect your positions.

Originally Posted by DavidO

I have an articles directory page with a list of over 100 keyword-rich titles. Each title is a link to the article page where the title and full article are published.

I never stopped to think about it but could posting all these titles twice be duplicate content?

What made me think about this is that now I want to redo my articles page in a blog format. That is, I'll have the title followed by the first few lines followed by a "read more" link to the full article.

That's a lot of keyword-rich content repeated on two different pages. But I know it's a common format.

What are the implications of this?

I wouldn't worry, this is not going to get you penalised. On blogs, for example, there can end up being so much duplicate content (depending on the system and configuration of course, but I was optimizing a blog last year and roughly each post ended up having 3 versions of itself in different locations) and Google doesn't penalise for this, only index 1 version.

I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[CliveG]

Some of the WordPress options and plugin options deal with this by telling the search engines not to index certain pages, for example, archives, categories, etc. Not sure what blog software you are using but I'm sure that you could do something along those lines if you are concerned about what you give priority to.