With the World Wide Web being as vast as it is it is well known that search engines avoid indexing multiple copies of the same content. By not indexing duplicate content their databases are optimised and will deliver their results faster.

How does this affect you?

By now you are probably wondering how this affects you? Well, it’s becoming more important to remove duplicate content within your own website/s as some search engine optimisation experts (including FIJ Design) hypothesise that the search engines now penalise sites for having duplicate content. We have run specific tests and it certainly does seem to cause an issue and improvements to rankings are seen once the issues have been removed.

Not sure if you have duplicate content on your website!

A lot of people assume their website doesn’t have any duplicate content as they’ve only got a handful of pages which may be on different subjects. This is a common mistake; duplicate content issues can arise from various areas including site architecture to content theft.

For example, lets take your homepage. It can usually be accessed at the following addresses:

• 1. www.yourdomain.com/
• 2. www.yourdomain.com/index.html

This in itself is duplicate content as both addresses lead to the same page and both can be indexed by the search engines. This also applies to addresses that contain “www” and addresses with no “www” (known as Canonicalization):

• 1. yourdomain.com/
• 2. www.yourdomain.com/

This is only one example, but you can see there is a possibility for a total of four versions of your homepage. The good news is there is a simple solution for this search engine duplicate content issue.

If you are running your website on a Linux (Apache) server you should be able to take advantage of Mod_Rewrite and Htaccess files to setup appropriate redirect functions. Information on using Mod_Rewrite can be found here: Apache Rewrite Guide

The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content

• Printer Friendly Pages
• Pages with highly similar content accessed via different urls
• Pages with items that are extremely similar, eg: the same product in various sizes
• Pages that do not handle affiliate ID’s correctly
• Pages with duplicate titles and Meta data
• Using URL session IDs
• Canonicalization issues

You can also use Mod_Rewrite to solve many of the above issues along with the “robots” Meta tag or robots.txt pattern exclusion.

At FIJ Design we carry out a full investigation of your website as part of our SEO service to discover all duplicate content issues. From this point we implement a strategic plan to remove anything discovered.