How to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Your Site

Started by Zekecamusio, 11-29-2011, 10:33:38

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ZekecamusioTopic starter

Did you know that over 60% of the websites have duplicate content on them? And did you know that this is the number one reason Google penalizes websites? In this article I'll show you how you can find duplicate content on your site and how you can fix it.

External vs. Internal Duplicate Content
When the same content is both on your site and on some other site, that won't hurt you. Think about it: if it did, all you'd have to do to hurt your competitors is to take their content and put it on some other website.

The kind of duplicate content you need to worry about is the internal. That is, when the same content is on two pages of your site or can be accessed through two different URLs.

Although external duplicate content won't hurt you, it sure helps having a lot of unique content on your site. If all your content is borrowed from other sources, you're adding very little value to the web and Google won't appreciate that.

Canonical URLs Issues
Try typing YourSite.com in your browser's address bar. Does it redirect to www.YourSite.com (with the "www")? Or maybe www.YourSite.com redirects to YourSite.com. Either way, you want to make sure that one version of your domain redirects to the other. I suggest having your non-www version redirect to your www version.

How you do this depends on what kind of server and hosting platform you use. Here's a good tutorial.

Home Page URL
When you link to your home page, you should be linking to "/", not to "/index.html" or "index.php". Check all the links you have pointing to your home page and fix any links that aren't pointing to "/". In addition to this, create a 301 redirect so people who type /index.php are redirected to "/". This tutorial explains how to create 301 redirects. Keep in mind that you can hire a good developer to fix all these issues for under $100, so it might not make a lot of sense for you to learn how to write code.

Different Versions of the Same Content
Do you have printer-friendly versions of your pages? Or maybe a mobile version of your site. Here you have two choices:

    You can use the robots.txt file to tell the search engines not to index the folder where you have your PDF files or printer-friendly pages.
    If you have several versions of the same page you can use the "rel canonical" tag. This is how it works: let's say you can access a certain piece of content through three different URLs. You want to choose your main URL and make that one the canonical version. And then on the other two pages you can use the rel canonical tag, which tells Google what the "official" URL for that content is. This is how you use it:
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

Almost-Duplicate Content
This is a very common problem. Let's say you have an e-commerce website with 100 different products. And, let's say you've written 20-word descriptions for each of your products. Here's the problem: each of your product pages has 20 unique words and a lot of content that doesn't change across your whole website (like navigation menus, headers, footers, etc.)

There are two things you can do about this:

    Reduce the amount of content that is common to all pages
    Add some unique content to each one of your pages. Write longer descriptions, explain how the products can be used, ask customers to leave reviews, tell stories, share testimonials and leave comments. Get creative. You'll get a better response if you offer a free giveaway to people who add content to your site.

Duplicate Content Caused by CMSs Not Set Up Properly
Most content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, have duplicate content issues out of the box. The good news is that it's easy to fix them.

    Make a list of the types of pages on your site, such as home page, categories, products, member profiles, etc.
    Take one page of each type and copy some of the text on the page
    Search for that text on Google (put it between quotes) and see if the text appears on more than one page. If it does, you have a duplicate content issue you need to fix

In most cases, you want to fix these issues blocking folders using Robots.txt (tutorial here) or using the rel canonical technique I talked about before.

Fixing duplicate content issues will considerably improve your Google rankings and organic traffic. Let me know if you have any questions.


Hogward

You can also make use of Google webmaster tool to fix the duplicate content issues on your site.

- You can set the GWT parameter blocking to prevent Google to index the URL with those parameters which has duplicate issues.
- You can set the GWT to remove URL directly, when there is no traffic or backlinks for it.
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damponting44

It can be difficult to know if your website contains duplicate content. Even when people try to avoid it, duplicate content can happen. This means that if there is any bit of content on your site that also shows up anywhere else on the web, you have got duplicate content—and it's not exactly helping your search ranking.

erieki

When it comes to duplicate content issue, saying "fix" we mean showing Google which of several identical pages is the original one. And there are several most common ways of how to do it:

1. Set 301 redirect
2. Use rel "canonical" tag
3. Choose preferred domain at Google Webmaster tools
4. Meta robots

virginoilseom

There are different best practices to avoid duplicate content issues. The main solution with content located in different URLs is to canonicalize the original one. You can use a 301 redirect, a rel=canonical or parameters handling tool from Google Webmaster Central.



Michealyardy

Copyscape is a great partner because it detects duplicate content outside of your blog. You can thus easily know if someone has duplicated your content without your permission or without giving you credits.

SnowflakesSoftware

Duplicate content is that appears one or two times inside a website. Generally, it leads to SEO penalties.
You can avoid this by using.

a) 301 Direct:-  It is the best way to avoid the problem of duplication. It tells the search engine which version of a page is the original and it links the duplication to the original one.

virtuatechnologies

According to Google Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. People mistake duplicate content for a penalty because of how Google handles it.