Since it’s taking me a while to get my content together for my own website, I figured I would do a post on a very important concept when it comes to content.

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.

First, there are two different types of duplicate content that I think you should know about.

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.

There is also something called external duplication, but that really shouldn’t be a worry for you.  It only really becomes a problem when it gets to extreme points with hundreds of pages with the same content.

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 duplicates are generally caused when your website displays pages with the WWW at the front or not.  VTSearchMarketing.com goes to the same place as www.VTSearchMarketing.com.  This can be a problem, however there is a simple solution.

Jump over to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Once you install this on your website, you’ll then have a preference to let Google know to treat both versions as one.  Hence solving the duplicate content problem.

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.

For near duplicate pages we have a couple of options.

By far the best option is to add relevant content to those pages.  Both the spiders and your website visitors will thank you for it.

The other option is to use the robots.txt option inside Google Webmaster Tools.

This file lets you tell Google what pages not to index.  You can remove single pages…

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.

Since you ultimately have control over all of the links and content on your own website, the search engines take very seriously how well you manage those elements when deciding how to rank your pages.

Fix the pages that have duplicate content.

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.

That’s all for now,

Jeff

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