Pod1 Blog

What is duplicate content?

As websites grow, they tend to include more multiple URLs returning the same content. Taking ecommerce websites as an example, these issues may be a side effect of having the same product in different categories – many URLs for exactly the same product.

Why is duplicate content an issue?

Simple because search engines spiders find it harder to crawl and index duplicated content. Search engines can also potentially assign a lower PageRank to the preferred version of the page.

How to fix duplicate content issues?

1. Find duplicate content on your site.
   Copy a unique block of text from a page and to Google it. Remember to limit the results to pages from your website – site:www.example.com.
2. Decide on your preferred versions of URLs.
   Once you identified all duplicate content issues, determine which URL would you prefer to use for that particular page?
3. Redirect all other URL versions to the preferred one using 301 permanent redirects.
   If it makes sense and is not going to confuse users, pick one URL and use the 301 redirect appropriately from the others.
4. Apply the rel=”canonical” link element on all pages featuring duplicated content.
   The rel=”canonical” link element is supported by major search engines such as Google, Ask.com, Bing and Yahoo. Once implemented it will ‘tell’ search engine spiders what the preferred version of the URL is.
5. Configure the URL parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Tools.
   Extremely useful if the website’s duplicate content comes from URLs with query parameters, e.g. www.example.com/category?page=2. The tool notifies Google (and Google only) about important or irrelevant query parameters in page URLs.