Why Is Duplicate Content No Big Deal?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, October 17, 2009 Leave a comment
Duplicate content “issues” still get a lot of airplay, except they aren’t really issues. For one thing, you can have two pages on your website with exactly the same content and your site won’t be penalized. That’s a common misconception. (unless of course your content is a standard reseller or partner content, ecommerce websites that resell products often encounter this).
What may happen instead is that you’ll get inbound links to both pages, which waters down your link building. Suppose each page gets 50 inbound links. That’s a total of 100 links that could go to benefit one page. You want to stop that.
There are two ways you can deal with that kind of duplicate content issue. You can redirect one of those pages to the other with a 301 redirect. That requires using your .htaccess file to command browsers and search bots to the correct page. Your links from one page to the other will transfer as well.
Another way is to simply add the canonical url tag – a meta tag – to one of the pages. That will tell search engine robots to index that page. But it doesn’t tell other webmasters not to link to the page that is getting your other links. My recommendation: Do both.
Leave a comment Category: Content Development
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