As more businesses, small and large, bring their products and services to the web, there is a growing concern about duplicate content. Duplicate content penalties can wreak havoc with your search engine rankings. There are many theories about how to avoid it, but for smaller website owners, some of these solutions require large budgets. The objective for this blog post is to provide some hints to help you identify, reduce and resolve your duplicate content issues!
Let’s first clarify what is meant when I say “duplicate content.” Duplicate content is simply content appearing within a website that is duplicated either on the same website or somewhere else on the Internet. Duplicate content can happen from people copying or stealing your content but it can also be much more innocent. For example, if you are a wholesaler of a product (or reseller of a service) your production information will be similar or exactly the same as other websites on the Internet. Sometimes even pages from within your own website can be similar to one another, as this is usually the case with dynamic product catalog pages. Search engines use a filter to remove duplicate content pages from the search results, and the spam along with it. The exact percentage of content duplication a search engine may penalize you for is not known, as it varies from one search engine to the next.
So, I suggest you try to reduce your pages similarity to prevent any form of penalties by this filter. Unfortunately, this can affect hardworking teams of data enterers by making their job that much harder, but it is much better to suffer now, then to fall prey to these filters and get your site stuck in the supplemental index, or worse! Here are some hints to help you identify and eventually reduce duplicate content issues today:
Google Search: Yes- that’s right, as easy as it sounds, one simple step is to do a Google Search! For website owners selling a product or service it is important that you be careful when listing this product or service description (or Product ID number) on your website. I have a hunch that this content can pose a problem if you are a reseller of any item or service that may be sold by another website. This hint is to help you find out if your product or service descriptions are being used by other websites. You can easily cut and paste a sentence of that description content into the Google search engine browser. The results pulled on the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) would then show you some of the other websites using the exact content to describe their offerings.
For example, if you sell a Persian wool rug that you bought from a wholesaler, and then used the manufacturer’s description to describe the rug to the consumer, it is likely that another website owner/reseller is doing the same exact thing. Or if you are a real estate agent, using a website template that comes with default descriptions, you may want to check the text being used to advertise your offerings. Since this duplicate content may pose a problem for your website at some point, it is better to revise the content to be more unique. I know there may be a lot of copy writing work involved (depending on your product database, but it may be worth it.) Surely, if you have high quality, trusted links pointing at your website, you may not have to worry as much….
Trusted, Quality Links: If you are an online business or e-commerce website that sells a similar product or service to another site owner, than you may have some similar product descriptions and/or ITEM numbers, and it could take forever to readjust your entire product inventory to accommodate the search engines. So here is a hint- have your trusted links from authority websites, such as your local Chamber of Commerce, or membership sites you belong to, like Historic Hotels of America, point to these deeper product or service pages.
This deep linking from a trusted website can sometimes counter act the duplicate content issue, because by pointing a trusted website to one of the main product or service pages of your site, you are informing the search engine that you are not a spammy website and your products, even though some of them may be duplicated on other websites, can be trusted. If you do not have any affiliations with trusted websites or organizations, then you should learn more about HUB Directories, and gain some quality in-bound links from them.
Mirror Site: If you have a website URL, like this, www.mysite.com, and you have another website with the same exact content on it, like www.mysamesite.com, then you may just have yourself an issue with a Mirror or Duplicate Content website. The best hint I can suggest to resolve this issue is a 301 redirect of every page. If you aren’t comfortable with doing this yourself, you can easily have your Web Master or Hosting person do this for you.
Also, if you just redesigned your website, like www.mynewsite.com, and every page has a new design look and feel, but the same content from your old site, www.myoldsite.com, then you will want to make sure the www.myoldsite.com has EVERY SINGLE page redirecting to www.mynewsite.com or delete these old pages from the server. If you do not get this Mirror issues resolved, they will turn into duplicate content and could harm your ranking in the search engines.
Robots.txt: When you have services, that other website owners are offering, like real estate, then you may need to block entire pages from the search engine robot to keep them from indexing it at all. A hint to help you with this is to use the robots.txt configuration. This will tell the spider not to crawl specific pages in your site directory. If you are a large website owner, and you offer services that other website owner’s offer, then you may be interested in blocking text to the search engine.
But if you are a small website owner, I do not recommend this tactic, but instead you may have to compromise design for success on the engines, and turn some of your duplicate content into textual images- text that is an image. This can be easily done, and look just as good with the right web designer in pocket. Of course, I recommend that for every page you block using Robots.txt, you are sure to create a new unique HTML article to compromise for the loss. Search engines like larger, content-rich websites, so to keep your website growing, add content often, especially when you take some away!
CopyScape: Designed to help business owners fight plagiarism online, CopyScape is the final hint for resolving duplicate content. Through this affordable service, a website owner, or web optimizer can easily locate the duplicate content their site has listed on other competitor’s websites. Once you are able to identify the other websites with duplicate copy, then you have to determine how to find that content on your website.
If your website is small, this is an easy feat, but for larger sites, it is best to run back to the top of this list, and embark on the Google Search trail to determine what pages of your site show up. However, if your website is not yet listed in the Google Index, you may have to actually do a manual investigation, page by page. An easy way to do this is using CTRL F, to help you quickly identify a phrase or sentence that is showing with duplicate content.
With so many business moving to the web, now is prime time to take action, resolve your duplicate content issues, and reclaim your niche rankings. Happy hunting!
Don’t forget to subscribe to the 10e20 RSS Feed!
Bookmark this post:
Many are calling it “the end of an era” in the Search Engine Marketing blogosphere. Danny is in fact leaving Search Engine Watch, but soon heading into a bold, new land of his own – Search Engine Land — which launches on December 11th.
Along with Danny comes the committed Chris Sherman, Barry Schwartz and a gang of other talented folks. They will be providing information about search engine marketing and how search engines work in general, from a searcher’s perspective. When the new site launches, it will provide visitors with features like:
- Original content covering developments in the search space.
- Daily blog posts covering search news from across the web.
- SearchCap: A daily email newsletter recapping search news from Search Engine Land and across the web. Also available by feed.
- SearchCap Monthly: A monthly email newsletter recapping search news over the past month. Also available by feed.
- A fresh, clean look — complete with new logo. Voted for by bloggers like you.
Danny and his team are excited about the upcoming launch of the site and surely it will be interesting to see how Search Engine Watch fares without Danny aboard, even though they claim they are committed to the search marketing community. It will be interesting to see how SEW will continue in-depth coverage of search engine technology, search marketing products, industry events and happenings, as well as updates on related SEM news and community discussions.
But hey, what you think about Danny’s new venture? Do you think it is a good move for him? Do you think SEW is going to do better without him or what (yes I had to ask even though I already know the answer)? And don’t forget to say a couple of words for him at his virtual going away party…
Bookmark this post:
