Is Duplicate Content Worrying You?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, September 19, 2009 Comments (4)

If you are concerned that duplicate content could be affecting your on site search engine optimization efforts, then perhaps the time has come to do something about it. The easiest fix to avoiding a duplicate content potential problem can be a simple as writing new user focused content for your pages of your website that are in question. There are a number of alternative avenues you can take that range from fixing your URL structure through to using a number of tools to resolve some issues that surround duplicate content.

You have been able to solve some duplicate content issues through Yahoo! Site Explorer for quite sometime using their Dynamic URLs feature. Google has quietly added a similar feature to their Webmaster Tools collection. Called “Parameter Handling” it enables a webmaster to specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in a URL. This can result in more efficient crawling and fewer duplicate URLs.

While Google continue to insist there is no penalty for duplicate content, there is little doubt that this is one issue that does effect rankings. It also one issue that most webmasters have difficulty controlling. If you have more than one URL pointing to the same content, Google will select the URL that it thinks is most appropriate. This means link juice flowing to other versions may be lost. Each page should only have one URL indexed within the search engines.

To access the feature, I assume you have a Google Webmaster account. If so, login and click on site configuration, and settings. You will find the “parameter handling” option near the bottom of the page.

Comments (4) Category: SEO

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4 Comments

Made Monday, 12 of October , 2009 at 2:53 pm

Hi Nick.
Thanks, this helps, however, being the relative beginner than I am, I am not always sure exactly how “duplicate content” is actually defined. What about articles you post on your site and then send out via ezine or other article directories? What about having a “printer friendly version”? What about posts on the same topic that are just worded differently?
Questions, questions! Thanks.
Lorraine

Comment by Andy @ iNET SEO

Made Monday, 12 of October , 2009 at 3:04 pm

Interesting point and one I had a discussion with a customer over. It seems they had been copying content and publishing it for many months and had around 65 static pages of this! They wanted to know why none of these pages were doing much for them. And they also noticed that their site traffic in general was down as their listings had slipped.

If they would have told me about all this copied content, it could have saved a lot of work.

But I for one, do believe that you are penalised to some degree if this is seen in quantity.

Safest thing here is to just avoid it at all costs – it doesn’t take that long to pen some content yourself, and if that is a problem, there are lots of document authors out there that can do the job for you.

Andy

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Monday, 12 of October , 2009 at 4:44 pm

Hi Lorraine,
Sure thing, I am happy to answer your questions!
I personally always prefer to write different content for different sources. For instance, I would never post the same article on 3 or 4 different sites. Although the changes of getting a penalty from that is slim, I would stay away as a best practice…

Comment by Lorraine Grula

Made Monday, 12 of October , 2009 at 5:26 pm

Thanks Nick. I have been sending out the same articles after I posted them. I’ll stop doing that. Someone told me that as long as google knew you originated the content, because they saw it on your site first, then it was ok to send the article out. Guess they were wrong.