What is Duplicate Content SEO?
Duplicate content can show up for many reasons on your website and it is detrimental to your web marketing efforts. The reason is that search engines don’t know what the “real” page is. I’ve put a video together to explain to you how duplicate content happens and how you can use some duplicate content SEO techniques to solve the problem.
Typical Duplicate Content SEO Problems:
- http://www.mywebsite.com and http://mywebsite.com both exist
- www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.ca both exist
- www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.com/index.html both exist
- www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.com/index.php both exist
There are many reasons for duplicate content but usually they can be addressed in one of two ways:
301 Re-direct to fix duplicate content SEO problems
301 redirect http://www.oldwebpage.com http://www.newwebpage.com
There are many variations on the syntax for specific purposes. For more complex uses, you can always Google 301 Redirect Syntax and get many examples and specific purposes.
Canonical References to fix duplicate content SEO problems
Sometimes you can’t redirect a page. Depending on the way your content management system serves up the pages if your re-direct /index.html to your homepage, it can sometimes create an endless loop and your website won’t work. A better way to deal with this situation is to add a canonical reference in the head of your web page HTML file. If you’re using a content management system, there are plug-ins you can install to help you do this. A canonical reference looks like this.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php”/>
So this would re-direct the search spiders to www.example.com/product.php
Any other duplicate page would be discounted and this one would be recognized.
If you need help fixing your duplicate content problems, you can always contact me. I’d be glad to fix them for you.
Google