If you don’t already know, duplicate content is bad. Don’t think you have duplicate content? Think again… Say some guy getting into your industry finds your site and decides he likes your content. He copies it onto his website and you’re the one that suffers a loss in your search engine placement.
And so thankfully Google is parlaying with us about what to do, here. Basically, they are saying people use duplicate content to try to garner more traffic, and Google is putting a stop to that.
Here’s how to prevent duplicate content on your site.
- If you have duplicate content on your site you can tell the search engines which pages not to index with a robots.txt file.
- If you have another copy of your site somewhere, use a 301 redirect to re direct users and search engines to the right site. (Ask me if you need help)
- Make sure you use the same link names to link to another page on your site. For example don’t link to indext.html, index.php, index.html/.
- Is your site available in more then one language? Use a top level domain to handle the language pages. For example for French you could get a site.fr or the UK would be site.uk
- You can use Google webmaster tools to pick a preferred domain. For example you could pick a www version or non www version of your URLs.
- Make sure other sites that have your content on their sites link back to you.
- If you use a content management system make sure that it does not publish the same content in multiple formats.
Following the above steps should help make sure your search engine placement does not suffer from issues with duplicate content, and if you do find a site that has duplicate content of yours you can always file a DMCO request.
