SES: Duplicate Content Revisited
So I don’t sound like a broken record (or a duplicated web page), I’ll briefly go over the duplicate content session at the Chicago SES conference. The reason for my abbreviated entry can be blamed on Lee Odden, who wrote an in-depth article about the same session and its featured on the WebProNews front page.
Another reason has to do with the coverage we provided during the Las Vegas PubCon, which also had a duplicate content session. By and large, the information from Chicago wasn’t that different from the Vegas conference. However, there are some important points that should be reiterated.
First, a great deal duplicate content is accidental and a result of numerous links pointing to the same page. To a search engine bot, this represents duplicate content. If a page has a normal canonical link pointing to it and another, perhaps dynamic link, doing the same, search engines will interpret this a being duplicate and they will act accordingly.
Other tidbits to be aware of:
- Search engines do not want duplicate content because it slows the information delivery process as well as causing unnecessary clutter.
- if you have numerous domains for one page, use 301 redirects
- choose one canonical domain and link all internal pages on the site to this domain
- exclude landing pages for ads using robots.txt
***These tips are courtesy of Jon Glick of Become.com
Additional tips (courtesy of Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs and Mikkel deMib Svendsen of deMib.dk) to consider:
- use your robot.txt or the appropriate meta tag (for dynamic sites) to exclude pages from being indexed
- dump all session ids in a cookie for all users, this can eliminate the session id duplicate content issues
- mainly, be on the look out for multiple URLs leading to an individual page, don’t wait for the engines to deal with, take care of it yourself…
This last point captures the theme of this particular session. Multiple URLs pointing to one page is one of the major causes of duplicate content because it gives the impression there are multiple occurrences of the same page even if the developer did not have intend to produce duplicate content. Be aware of these URLs and use the appropriate “fixes” to address the situation.
duplicate content is never a good thing however be careful with this … if you have numerous domains for one page, use 301 redirects … redirects rarely provide a solution.
yaah,everyone shoud respect the copyright rule & on the point of seo its also not wise,cz google has indexed the urls in to supplement results where google get confused about the content of websites