How To Prevent Duplicate Content
Having duplicate content on your site is like wearing the same dress to the prom as someone else! If Google were a bouncer guarding the prom's door, ready to boot out faux pas-offenders that is.
Having duplicate content on your site not only ruins your credibility, it also ruins your rankings. And you work hard for your rankings (well you should be working hard for your rankings). But, how can you be sure that you don't have copied content on your site? Luckily, that's the easy part. OR that no one else is copying from you?
Uncovering duplicate content is as easy as clicking a button—literally. You can use copyscape.com plagiarism tool to detect any plagiarized content on your site. On their opening page there is a box where you input your Webpage and click “go” (although Google's “I'm feeling lucky” button might have been more fitting).
From there you may get a page of results that closely match your content, but hopefully it comes up empty. Now do the same for all of your pages with content on them as Google indexes all of your pages, not just the opening page. Be aware that if you have multiple domain names redirecting o your primary site you will want to check those as well for duplicated content.
What Qualifies as Duplicate Content?
According to the Google Gods “duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”--and no that quote wouldn't be flagged as copied content since it is one quote within original text. Should Google find duplicate content on your site they will bite back by taking a bite out of your rankings!
Google offers advice on how to avoid these issues:
- let them know which is your main site (instead of a redirect or print version) by using regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
- Use 301 redirects to direct the Googlebot and other search engine spiders.
- Link internally with consistency.
- Use Top Level Domains wherever possible.
- Use trackbacks if you post your content on another site for marketing purposes.
- Avoid duplicating site information, for example don't use long copyright text on every page when a summary page will suffice.
