Finding And Resolving Duplicate Content On Your Site
One aspect of SEO that has been causing confusion is the issue of duplicate content within a site. Whether or not any of the search engines ‘penalize’ a site for having duplicate content is no longer an issue – it’s plain they don’t. That doesn’t mean your site will not suffer because of duplicate content.
Duplicate content is not an issue for many sites. Where it is an issue is in the watering down of inbound links. If your content appears under two or more URLs, it is conceivable that each URL is benefiting from inbound links. The ideal of course is for one URL, or one version of your content, to receive the benefit of all inbound links for that page.
There are two approaches you can take. The first is to find duplicate content and deal with it on a page by page basis; the second is to implement a site wide program that will prevent any duplicate content issues. You could of course do both.
Let me make one point clear. In many cases you simply cannot stop duplicate content. Blogs are good example where a post will have its own page, have category version and also an archive version. It will also have a root level version until it drops off the front page of the blog. So, accept that duplicate content is here to stay.
To check if you have any duplicate content issues, select a key sentence for the page you want to check and do a site search using Google. Use the search command site:your url “search term”.
Google will return a list of the pages indexed for that term on your site. If there is more than one page listed then you have a duplicate content issue. How do you solve it?
You can use redirects, which can get messy, or use the latest in SEO quick fixes – the use of the canonical tag. The canonical tag goes into the header of the page and uses the format:
[link rel=“canonical” href="preferred url for page"]
Note, replace the square brackets with the > ( ] ) and < ( [ )symbols. This tag is now respected by all major search engines. Its role is to tell the search engine that this particular URL is the preferred one. Any references to another URL for that content will automatically point to the correct URL.
It is a simple solution that should now be a standard part of every page’s SEO program.
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