Duplicate Content for Men's and Women's Version of Site

[LeahHutcheon]

So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage.

The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages.

While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page?

Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary?

My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely?

Hope this makes sense, thanks!

[LeahHutcheon]

Thanks for the responses guys.

We were going to just have a unisex version of these pages located on the female sections and have the links on the male part redirect there, but our designer thought this would break the customer process up too much as once on those pages, the only way back to where they were (the male part) would be to click the back bottom on the browser as simply clicking to return home would take them to the home of the female part.

I'll make them canonical them - cheers!

[gfiorelli1]

I don't agree that much Adam about the useless nature of the About Us page. It's in that page that a company usually share its Why.

Said that... treat all these pages as "unisex". With that I mean: create just one page with an unique URLs and use it both for the woman version of the site and the male one.

If that is not possible, use the rel="canonical" choosing one URL as the canonical one.

[Chris.Menke]

As Matt said, boilerplate stuff is a tossup but your about page should be rankable for some unique facet of your business and for that reason, I'd be sure to 301 (if the pages are different) or canonicalize (if the page content is the same) to your preferred version.

[Adam_Cochran]

In all honesty people worry far too much about the duplicate content rule. Duplicate content is primarily for content sites and only penalized on a large scale.

In your case not only is the about page one that you likely aren't hoping to get ranked, but it's such a small factor that I doubt it will come into play.

Your inbound marketing strategy is likely to be much more than SEO traffic in fact I'd be willing to bed that a good 60%+ of your traffic is direct and/or social. In such a case as long as users are able to find the information they need on the site (and ultimately convert to bookings keeping the end-client happy and cash flowing) then I wouldn't worry about the "About Us" page.

Remember two things:

1. Put the customer experience first and everything else is gravy.

2. A good business (and good marketing) is a bigger picture than just SEO these days. Focus on what traffic origin makes sense for you and make sure they can access the information they need.

Here's what Matt Cutts had to say on the issue:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459