Search engine spiders establish site’s relevance as a whole. It is very important that your website has a fresh, uniquely written and interesting in both users and search engines. Duplicate content is the most common problem that most of the webmasters are facing. This may be among the inner pages or with the other website copying your content. If your website is suffering from this problem, search engines could possibly devalued highly similar pages that affect everything, including the internal link authority. Google which is regarded as the number one search engine in the world is really strict when it comes to duplicate content, they can even ban or take off your site from the index. This is how serious duplicate content is and which means if you’re having this kind of problem with your website, FIX IT NOW.
To be able to check in Google that your website is experiencing duplicate content, simply type: site:www.example.com <space><a snippet of any content on your website>. For example, site:www.example.com The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This will actually return with results, if it returns one result then that means that you don’t have the duplicate content issue otherwise if it returns a lot of result then indeed your website is facing a big problem.
Below are the different options that you could do to resolve this kind of issue.
a. Revise or rewrite pages which cause duplicate content – Most often this will take time in revising the content of the page causing the duplicate content. But would really help if you have time to do such revisions.
b. Block using robots.txt the unnecessary pages – Blocking unnecessary pages which are contributing to the duplicate problem would also help. This will disallow spiders to crawl upon these pages.
c. Do a 301 permanent redirection – Permanent Redirection would really help especially if the affected page has a canonical page. Example, if your home page is www.example.com and there is also www.example.com/index.php, if both of this is indexed then it will create a duplicate content issue thus would affect the ranking. You need to do a 301 redirect from www.example.com/index.php to www.example.com to solve this issue.
d. Use the link canonical element
– Just recently Google engineers was able to come up with a quick solution if all other options are not applicable. This is the link canonical element which other calls link canonical tag. You just need to add this element on the affected page to inform spiders (especially Google bots) that this is the canonical page.
To have more information about SEO please check also The very basics of Search Engine Optimization or SEO and How to Use Google Keyword Tool
Tags: canonical, duplicate content, google, robots, search engine, seo tip, webmasters
