Site Structure Help

Hi all,

I want to get your advice on how to structure my new site for SEO. I am creating a Q&A site. Each question has it's own page which includes all the answers and comments to that question. In addition, there are topic pages that show the most popular questions and their most recent answer.

My goal is to get the TOPIC pages indexed and ranked. However, I am worried because the content on the topic pages is a subset of the content that is displayed on the most popular question pages.

So, my big question is can I get this topic page ranked even though the content on it appears elsewhere in my site, or will the duplicate content "penalty" make this not feasible?

How do sites like about.com get their topic pages ranked when almost all the content can be found elsewhere also? Finally, is there a way to tell google to ignore certain parts of a webpage (in which case I could section off the repeat parts of a question page)?

I hope I was clear enough in explaining my problem. I would be happy to give any other details that are needed to clarify.

yes, use robots.txt to tell google which pages not to index.

thanks for the response, but that won't work for me since i want the question pages indexed also. the topic pages only include the latest answer, so there is still a lot of unique content that i want indexed on both pages.

Since I'm still looking for an answer, I figured I'd post with some clearer questions.

I've been told that on-site duplicate content doesn't pose too much of an issue. If I have significantly more backlinks pointing to the topic page, will that invariably get ranked over the question pages for that keyword.

And, if that does work, will this inhibit the question pages from being ranked for long-tail keywords?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I don't think your question is very clear. What is topic page and what is most popular page?