Duplicate content is something that you may already have present on your website. Don't worry! We're going to talk about how to fix it right now.
Let's start by going over the two main types of duplicate content issues.
1. Exact Duplication - two pages on your website that are identical.
2. Close Duplication - two pages that are so similar in content that only a few words or sentences are different.
External duplication also exists, but you should spend too much time worrying about it. This only exists when you take the same content and spam it over hundreds or thousands of web pages. External duplication does not happen naturally, and is usually the result of some less than sounds SEO strategy.
Close duplication is probably what you'll run into most often. On websites that have dynamically generated content for product pages or categories, it can often appear to be a duplicate page because you really haven't gone in and developed each product or category to the point where the search engines can make sense of the difference between the actual product and your page templates.
Exact duplication will likely be caused by having both the WWW version and normal version of your URL landing on the same page. There is a simple solution to this with Google, and honestly, most of the search engines are wise to this issue now.
Head to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
This tool, installed on your website, will allow you to set a preference for Google to treat both versions as the same.
You'll also want to be sure that all the links on your website link the same way. You can link to your homepage by www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html (or default.aspx). Both of those appear the same, but you can help the search engines by being consistent with your linking throughout your pages.
Near duplication gives us a couple of options in how we handle it.
My preferred method is to actually go in and write some good content for the pages that appear to be duplicates. This will make the search engines and your visitors happy.
The other option is to use the robots.txt option inside Google Webmaster Tools.
You can remove single pages from the index or entire directories.
Disallow: /security.html
Or even whole folders on your site
Disallow: /images
Reducing the amount of duplicate content on your website can have give you a significant boost in rankings once the spiders have had time to crawl your site and notice all the clean-up you've done.
Pay particularly close attention to the links inside your own website. Since you have direct control over these links, the search engines give more weight to their importance.
Duplicate content issues should be fixed!
Google wants to help you with this. The Webmaster Tools recently got an update that will show you which pages it considers to be duplicates. Simply go to Diagnostics - Crawl errors and you'll be presented with a list of pages that Google isn't too thrilled about.
Check back often, as sometimes it can take months or even several months for Google to post this information after crawling your website.
Let's start by going over the two main types of duplicate content issues.
1. Exact Duplication - two pages on your website that are identical.
2. Close Duplication - two pages that are so similar in content that only a few words or sentences are different.
External duplication also exists, but you should spend too much time worrying about it. This only exists when you take the same content and spam it over hundreds or thousands of web pages. External duplication does not happen naturally, and is usually the result of some less than sounds SEO strategy.
Close duplication is probably what you'll run into most often. On websites that have dynamically generated content for product pages or categories, it can often appear to be a duplicate page because you really haven't gone in and developed each product or category to the point where the search engines can make sense of the difference between the actual product and your page templates.
Exact duplication will likely be caused by having both the WWW version and normal version of your URL landing on the same page. There is a simple solution to this with Google, and honestly, most of the search engines are wise to this issue now.
Head to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
This tool, installed on your website, will allow you to set a preference for Google to treat both versions as the same.
You'll also want to be sure that all the links on your website link the same way. You can link to your homepage by www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html (or default.aspx). Both of those appear the same, but you can help the search engines by being consistent with your linking throughout your pages.
Near duplication gives us a couple of options in how we handle it.
My preferred method is to actually go in and write some good content for the pages that appear to be duplicates. This will make the search engines and your visitors happy.
The other option is to use the robots.txt option inside Google Webmaster Tools.
You can remove single pages from the index or entire directories.
Disallow: /security.html
Or even whole folders on your site
Disallow: /images
Reducing the amount of duplicate content on your website can have give you a significant boost in rankings once the spiders have had time to crawl your site and notice all the clean-up you've done.
Pay particularly close attention to the links inside your own website. Since you have direct control over these links, the search engines give more weight to their importance.
Duplicate content issues should be fixed!
Google wants to help you with this. The Webmaster Tools recently got an update that will show you which pages it considers to be duplicates. Simply go to Diagnostics - Crawl errors and you'll be presented with a list of pages that Google isn't too thrilled about.
Check back often, as sometimes it can take months or even several months for Google to post this information after crawling your website.
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Don't head off on a search engine optimization operation without getting all the information you need for success. Learn more about the tools and techniques that should know prior to head off oning your Vermont search engine optimization operation.
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