Difference between revisions of "Duplicate Content, Why Once is Enough"

By [[User:|]] on

In business, or at a dinner party, repeating youreslf is not a good thing. No one wants to hear another version of the same "when I was in college," story. Search engines like dinner guests have limited use for repetition.

What exactly is duplicate content?

Duplicate content mirrors other content exactly or significantly. It can be posted on the same domain, or on another domain. Most of the time, duplicate content is not meant to deceive viewers, but it often dilutes the authenticity of an online business.

Why duplicate content is bad news

In some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains to manipulate search engine ranking, or garner more traffic. Deceptive practices can result in poor user experience and turn off potential customers or clients. When a visitor sees the same content repeated within a set of search results, they are likely to leave a site and never return.

Google does a thorough job trying to index and show pages with distinct information. If Google perceives duplicate content with the intent to manipulate rankings and deceive users, they'll make handslapping adjustments to the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of both sites may suffer -- or worse, both sites could be removed from Google's index, meaning they will not appear in search results!

Things you can do prevent duplicate content on your site

Building a website takes time, energy and financial resources. You want people and search engines your to find your site easily. Once there, you'd like a viewer to find it useful and informative. Showing duplicate content on multiple pages will diminishe a user's experience. There are specific things you can do when developing a site to avoid creating duplicating content.

• Use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. Many readers will know that http://www.mocksite.uk contains United Kingdom-centric content, over http://www.mocksite.com/uk, or http://uk.mocksite.com. canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when several choices are available.

• If your site has a printer version of a page that is identical to a viewable version of the same page, you can help Google avoid blocking these pages by using a noindex meta tag.

• Use 301 redirects if you've restructured your site. 301 redirects permanently redirect content in your .htaccess file to redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders.

• Keep your internal linking consistent. Don't use multiple variations to link to the same place. For example, http://www.mocksite.com/ and http://www.mocksite.com/page and http://www.mocksite.com/page/index.htm.

• If you syndicate your content on other sites, do it carefully! Google will always show the version they find to be the most appropriate for users in each given search -- regardless of whether it's your preferred version.

Make sure each site syndicating your content includes a link back to your original article. Remember, you can always request that anyone using your syndicated material use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content, too.

• Use Google Webmaster Tools to define how your site is indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

• Don't use boilerplates of lengthy copyright text on the bottom of each page. Instead, include a brief summary of the content you wish to display, then add a link to a specific page for more details. Try Google's parameter handling tool to see how they to treats URL parameters.

• Users don't like finding empty pages, so try to avoid placeholders where possible. Don't publish incomplete pages or pages under construction. If you do create placeholder pages, use a noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.

• Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your website. Blogs, forums, and related items often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blogpost may appear on the home page, on an archive page, or on a page with other entries using the same label.

• Lastly, if you have many pages that are similar, perhaps on a travel site, consider developing each page uniquely, or consolidate the pages into one. For example, you have separate pages for Manhattan, NY and Brooklyn NY, but much of the same information appears on both. You could merge the two pages together, or expand each page to contain unique content exclusive to each burrow.

Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicate pages by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to too much crawling of your website, you can adjust the crawl rate settings in Webmaster Tools.

Remember, duplicate content on a website is not grounds for punitive action from Google unless it appears that the duplicate content is intended to deceive or manipulate search engine results.