Today’s tip is a quick and easy one that everybody should be looking to implement. If you offer a print version of your website for your visitors there is, in fact, a right and a wrong way to handle them.

As websites have evolved and become increasingly reliant on graphics to deliver content, more and more savvy webmasters and designers have incorporated printer friendly versions into their sites. Typically a printer friendly link will be a part of the main site navigation section and it’s pretty much just a link to a copy of the web page that will format nicely for the user’s printer.

What if your site prints fine the way it is? Should you still have a printer friendly version of the page?

I’d say no. If you’ve tried printing your site a few times and it looks fine, then I wouldn’t advise adding a printer version just to have one. Actually that brings us to the point of the tip. The primary danger associated with printer pages is inadvertently making the search engines think you are duplicating your content.

The dreaded duplicate content penalty…

Right. Except that it’s not so much a ‘penalty’. I’ve talked to several knowledgeable Google people, like Adam Lasnik, Vanessa Fox and Matt Cutts about duplicate content penalty and they all pretty much say that the duplicate content penalty would probably be more accurately referred to as a duplicate content filter.

Google isn’t necessarily penalizing or punishing sites (in most cases) for duplicated content. However, they also aren’t interested in returning duplicated pages in their search results. As a result, the duplicate content filter is in place to keep the Googlebot from indexing the same content over and over.

So I guess you want to make sure your printer friendly pages don’t get you filtered somehow as duplicated content.

Right. In most cases you wouldn’t want your printer page indexed and your regular page filtered as duplicated for a bunch of reasons. You may not have complete navigation links, you may not have your ads included, – lots of things… think about it this way, if you wouldn’t care if your printer friendly page resulted instead of or way ahead of your normal page, you should probably not have 2 versions of your page to begin with.

So, assuming you do want to have a printer friendly page available, how do you avoid the duplicate content filter.

Well there are 3 main ways to keep robots out of your printer pages… and they’re all really easy to implement.

The first one works on a domain or server level. You can just use your robots.txt file. Basically what you do here is keep all of your printer pages in one directory and exclude all robots from that directory.
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html#code

The second method works on the printer page itself. The trick here is to use a robots META tag in the header of your printer friendly pages. Zapping a noindex instruction in your meta tag set takes all of 5 seconds and it works just fine.
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html

The third option works on your original page where you link to the printer page. If you don’t want the crawlers to follow the link to you r printer page you can simply add a “nofollow” attribute to your actual hyperlink.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

Is it ok to use more than one option?

Sure that shouldn’t be a problem at all. As a matter of fact it’s probably advisable. If you make a mistake or forget to add one a nofollow to your links, for example… but you have the whole printer page directory excluded in your robots.txt file, you’re covered either way.

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