Duplicated Content

By Dima Svirid On June 21, 2012 · Leave a Comment

This is Part 4 of “Search Engine Optimization – Do It Yourself!” series of articles I wrote to share my experience about SEO.

Avoid duplicating the content! Remember this and pass it to the others. “Duplicated content” phenomenon will hit your website ranking one day and it will hit it hard. So if you think that nothing is going to happen when you copy content from another source – think again.

How to avoid duplicated content

Quality content

Every aricle of your website has to be unique. Don’t try to copy content form somewhere else. At least if you cannot write content on your own. Try to re-write articles from other sources in your own words.

Explicitly duplicate content

If for some reason you need to copy the content from another source. The reason, of course, not to get higher ranking but to make website more informative. You have to specify a canonical link in your HTTP header. Canonical link tells Google that this content refer to another page.

<head>
	<link rel="canonical" href="http://ajax911.com/original-article.html">
</head>

If you are using WordPress, SEO plugin (I mentioned in my previous articles) will help you to configure canonical links.

Set preferred domain

You have to make a hard decision how would you like your website to appear in Google’s search results, with www. or without it. The problem with having multiple URLs for the same page is that you’re effectively diluting your link authority. For example, if you rank for both website.com and www.website.com, Google sees these links as two different websites. Pick one URL and stick to it. How to do that is I described in details in my Webmaster Tools article.

Internal links

Incorrect internal linking can also be a reason of the duplicated content. Try to keep your internal linking consistent. Here is an example, links below are different links for Google but they produce same content:

//Slash at the end
http://ajax911.com/search-engine-optimization-diy OR

http://ajax911.com/search-engine-optimization-diy/

//File name in the link
http://ajax911.com/ OR

http://ajax911.com/index.php

To fix your internal links you can either specify a canonical link in your HTTP header or have a 301 redirect.

Continue with Friendly URL for SEO (Permalinks)