Printer Friendly Pages and Duplicate Content

Many sites have printer friendly versions. I have it on my corporate site, I do not have it on this blog. But what happens when these printer friendly versions get crawled and indexed by a search engine? You can then run into the duplicate content filter. It is not a penalty, but it sure can feel like one. You do not want your printer friendly pages coming up in the SERPs and your regular pages not.

What can you do to prevent this?

• Use JavaScript links to pop open the printer friendly page
• No index the page
• Exclude the directory for the printer friendly pages in your robots.txt file
• Use the nofollow tag for those pages
• Use CSS to produce a printer friendly page

Past articles on duplicate content in most recent order:

• Naming the Duplicate Content Filter
• What To Call Duplicate Content Washing in Google - GoogleWashing, DupeWash, SourceWash?
• New Duplicate Content Filter
• Duplicate Content - Resellers Ranking Higher
• Duplicate Content Penalty Not a 30 60 90 Day Time Span
• Duplicate Content Penalty Timespan
• What is Duplicate Content

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.