Duplicate content on yearly product models.

[DCochrane]

TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content?

Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes.

The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches.

Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content  to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product.

Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue?

The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold.

Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.

[TakeshiYoung]

The exact threshold that Google uses to determine duplicate content is a tricky one.

The more important question is, are you noticing a problem? Are both pages being indexed (2013 & 2014)? When you search for the 2014 model in Google, is it showing up in the search results or is it being filtered out as duplicate content? If your content isn't being indexed or isn't ranking, then you have a problem.

Panda also can be an issue, but only if a large portion of your site is duplicated. Is this model upgrade process something you apply to 1 or 2 products, or are you talking hundreds? What proportion of your site is nearly duplicate content compared to original content. If the percentage is too large, you could be at risk of Panda.

If this is only for a couple of pages, you can always just take a little time to re-write the description from last year to improve its uniqueness, and also bolster the page with unique content like user reviews and new photos & videos of your product. Once a product model is discontinued, you can also 301 redirect it to the newer models.

[Branden_S]

First, yes it's an issue if 80% of the content is duplicate.  Panda will not like this at all.

There are a few strategies that will fix the issue... primarily write new content.  I know its time consuming, but content is king.  Take the old description and reword it, tweek it, change it. ...anything to make it different than last years product content.

You can also iframe the old product description on the new page.  This will prevent Google from indexing the old content on the new page.  But then your new page might have too thin of content...back to the original solution...write more content.

Rand had a video about this issue a few weeks ago.  http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls

Hope this helps