by, Dan Dixon, Web Reach Consulting
It's widely-known that having duplicate content on a website is frowned-up upon by Big G. What's less known is what that means in a practical sense, and how to handle it. Here's a few pointers to help you handle troublesome applications of Google's duplicate content rule.
It's widely-known that having duplicate content on a website is frowned-up upon by Big G. What's less known is what that means in a practical sense, and how to handle it. Here's a few pointers to help you handle troublesome applications of Google's duplicate content rule.
Some duplicate content applications are fairly straightforward with a little good judgment and proper content editing.
- Not unlike academia, Google wants you to write your own content and not steal others'. Don't steal someone else's content word-for-word (i.e. plagiarize) to avoid being booted from the index.
- Putting the same content on sites located at various different domains reduces the value that Google will perceive your site to provide. For example, three different sites, say caringfordogs.com, dogcare.com and treatspotright.com will suffer to perform if they utilize the same content.
- Google wants to make websites available in search results that provide valuable content. Avoid listing the same content on multiple pages of the same site or you may find yourself in a pinch with Google.
Other Domain and URL Issues are a little more difficult to control. In these cases Google's bots are usually confused by technical details of how to index your content. Your goal is to follow the recommended guidelines to ensure Big G gets it right.
- Multiple URLs for the Same Page: If your CMS creates multiple URLs for the same page on your site, such as yoursite.com/index.php?=query and yoursite.com/index/query.php, then you will need to 301-redirect the duplicated pages to the preferred one, and link to the preferred page in site code.
- YourSite.com versus YourSite.com/index.html: Often a visitor can load a Home Page by using the top-level domain OR by adding a page name similar to /index.html. To avoid Google splitting PageRank between the two pages, hard-code home links to the domain without the page name.
- WWW vs. no-WWW: Use Google's Webmaster tools to let Google know your preferred domain, or risk splitting PageRank between them.
- Syndication: Make sure syndicators link back to your site as reference, and remember that Google may choose the syndicators site in the ranking instead of yours. If you want your site in the rankings for the content, ask the syndicator to use meta noindex tags on pages with syndicated content.
For a complete overview of Google's duplicate content guidelines, click here.
