BoostRanks SEO Tips

There’s a lot of talk about duplicate content, people go to great lengths to try and stop search engines indexing duplicate content. But just how bad is it?

Well, it depends. There’s different types of duplicate content. For example, you could have a site.com and a site.net, personally I would redirect .net to .com, but if not, the search engines are smart enough to know they are the same site. They will direct traffic to the site with the most incoming links. Still, it’s preferable to redirect.

Another cause for duplicate content is having the same content on www.site.com and site.com. Again, you won’t get punished for this, search engines will pick one url as the main site and direct traffic to it. In the case of google, you can even tell it what the main url is. It’s still preferable to redirect one url to the other. I like plain site.com, I think prefixing the url with www is dated. I set it up so www.site.com redirects to site.com.

Yet another cause for duplicate content is having a url like site.com/page/ where the same content will also be on site.com/page/index.html. I personally prefer urls like site.com/page/ and as long as your site doesn’t link to site.com/page/index.html, all incoming links should point to site.com/page/. No cause for alarm here.

With blogs like this one (a wordpress blog in this case) there will be duplicate content in the various indexes, like tags, categories, date, etc. There’s plugins to insert headers to stop search engines indexing different indexes, but it’s no big deal. The search engine knows the content is the from the same site, and you don’t get punished. People don’t usually link to indexes, they link to articles.

Where you will get punished is when site.com and thief.com have the same content, in this case, the search engine will pick one site as the original, and punish the other. Sometimes they get it wrong. One way to help with this is to put a link on your page pointing back to the same page. That way, if someone scraps you, their copy will have a link back to your page, and the search engine should pick yours as the original. There’s a wordpress plugin that does this for you called RSS Footer.

The other disadvantage of having multiple urls with the same content is stats. If two urls which point to the same content get linked, there’s no easy way to combine the clicks for each link.

So my stance is for urls like site.com and site.net, redirect. www.site.com and site.com, redirect. Where content gets duplicated because of, say, wordpress, I don’t worry about it. Just add a link back to itself, and be happy ;)