What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is just what it sounds like, the same or near same text content served on two or more locations, even if they are the same domain!
If the contents of a page are not identical but similar to another page on the internet, it may also be seen as duplicate content.
Duplicate content is considered spamming by search engines and may incur a penalty on your sites rankings.
Is Duplicate Content Bad for My Site?
Depending on who you talk to, you will get two different answers. A vast majority of people in the SEO business say that duplicate content will hurt your chances of getting a high ranking, or even worse, will get you deleted from the index altogether.
On the other hand, a lot of people in the business say that duplicate content is harmless because people can’t control what other people put on the web.
This is a fair and valid point, but we would recommend on the side of caution. Try to avoid duplicate content to the best of your ability.
How Can I Avoid Duplicate Content?
The most common cause of duplicate content is web masters not realising they are serving two copies of their own site.
You must make sure that your host-less (non-www) address has a 301 Redirect to your "www" address.
You will notice, if you type http://seofever.com into your web browser, you will get redirected to http://www.seofever.com. This is because we have setup a 301 Redirect to stop duplicate content from occurring on our site. See our article on 301 Redirects for more information on how to achieve this.
Some of the things you can check for on your site to help you stop serving duplicate content are;
- News/RSS feeds
- E-Commerce product descriptions
- Using the same content on sub-domains or top level country domains
These are just but a few of the things that will cause a search engine to deem your content as duplicated.
If you would like to check if your site has duplicate content, check out http://www.copyscape.com.
All you have to do is enter your URL and it will check for you!
28th June 2006
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