SEO Basics – Duplicate Content
Posted by Malcolm Slade on Friday, August 25th, 2006 in Digital Marketing, SEO
Currently, search engines are trying to reduce the amount of redundant content in their indexes. By redundant I mean duplications of the same content. When a search engine travels the web, it will no doubt find similar or even identical pages. As it encounters these it has to make an assessment of which is the most authoritative and which are just copies. The copies will have their weight reduced and thus rank lower in the search engines.
This assessment is carried out automatically without human intervention and therefore can often be wrong. Therefore it is essential that you don’t through your own site to the lions by making common duplicate content errors. By adhering to the following simple guidelines, you should be able to avoid penalties and ensure your content is given the credit it deserves (or the credit the search engines feel it deserves anyway).
Firstly don’t duplicate large amounts of content across your site. If several pages are to convey the same message, rewrite the content to it is significantly different in length and structure.
Search engines identify a page by it URL therefore it important to only have a single URL that points to each page. The most common errors are;
- http://www.blahsite.com
- http://blahsite.com
- http://blahsite.com/index.html
- http://www.blahsite.com/index.html
- http://www.blahsite.com/index.html?id=whatever&page=blah
- http://www.blahsite.com/index.html?page=blah&id=whatever
- http://www.blahsite.com/index.html?source=whatevercampaign
Usually these errors come about via internal linking and can be fixed by modifying that, sometimes however it may be necessary to redirect, especially if external links are pointing to some of the URLs you wish to make redundant.
If worst comes to worst, you can try adding <rel=”nofollow”> tags to the offending links although this standard hasn’t currently been fully adopted by all the major search engines.
