Get rid of your duplicate content

What does duplicate content mean, why can it be dangerous for your search engine ranking and how to avoid creating duplicate content?

There has been a very intensive discussion about duplicate content in the last few years. It has become a big problem for some site owners, mostly because they just did not know about the problem and even that they were actually running into it without knowledge. So let us first take a closer look on what this problem basically is.

What is duplicate content?
Search engines are constantly trying to improve the quality of their results as they want to provide the user with content which fits best to his or her search term.
If a search engine is indexing a webpage with content which is duplicate to content on another site, they would waste space in their index database, processing power and time on indexing this content once more. So they tend to decide which of these two (or sometimes even more) pages with the same content on it seems to be the most important one. The other pages might not be indexed and can therefore not be found by users of this search engine.

How to avoid duplicate content?
Most websites can be reached via more than one URL, http://www.domain.com AND http://domain.com - This can be a problem with search engines treating those versions of the URL as two different domains, which will result in content existing multiple times. This can be solved easily, you just have to add the following to your .htaccess-File:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Read here on drostdesign.com how to implement this to your site. Try it with my domain, just entering marcorichter.net into your browser will redirect you to www.marcorichter.net as a result of the above changes to my .htaccess-File.
Additionally, if you are using Google Webmaster Tools then you can tell Google which domain you prefer as your main URL.

Is WordPress a problem?
WordPress is giving you several capabilities of managing the content of your site and can be considered being some kind of content-management-system. But some of these features may cause trouble for you as WordPress could render almost 100% of your content as dublicate content. Oleg Ishenko of seoresearcher.com has written a very detailed article on how to make your wordpress blog duplicate content safe. It is definitely worth reading if you are running WordPress and are new to the duplicate content issue.

Maybe you are a more visual person, you might rather like viewing a video on this. Here is one from Michael Gray from Graywolf’s SEO Blog explaining how to avoid duplicate content in your wordpress blog.

What is behind duplicate content?
The way, search engines try to recognize duplicate content and how they try to rank the right pages, but not the copy cats is somewhat technical and not so easy to say, as each search engine will have its own way to handle this. If you want to know more about the background of this, Todd Malicoat at Stuntdubl SEO is providing some great background research on How to Remedy Duplicate Content and Magical % Thinking. Great article, thanks Todd.

Please let me know, whether this was useful for you or not. Thank you.

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duplicate content, google, dc, seo

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