Duplicate content is always a bit of a thorny issue in SEO. Whilst it’s fairly clear cut when a website copies text straight from a secondary source, there has been questions raised over the impact of having numerous domains for one site.
Whilst it has been widely accepted for some time that having individual URLs all leading to the same page may be harmful to your ranking, Google have now broken their silence and suggested quite the opposite. Although in true Google style they stopped short of saying anything too definitive.
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It’s one of those rare occasion when the three major search engines come together in an effort to improve search by agreeing on common standards.
Search Engines Unite With Canonical Tag
This time, it’s the turn of duplicate content and the issue of canonicalisation. Canonical, in this context, refers to the issue of duplicate content and there’s many reasons why this may occur. For legitimate reasons, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have now agreed a new standard tag to be used in the header section of a web page to specify the preferred URL.
All very good as it will flag up to the search engines and work in a similar way to 301 redirects, i.e. consolidate your link popularity to the preferred location.
Further Reading:
This is a very basic issue but one that we see crop up regularly.
Duplicate content, in very simple terms, is to be avoided. This could be a page that has been used elsewhere on your site or a very keen Webmaster buying every domain extension of your brand and replicating the content on each.
We sometimes have a situation where a client purchased a domain and then through a branding initiative or other strategic reason, have gone on to buy a second domain. This could be a different name or just a change of extension, e.g. .com to .co.uk.
Either way, if not properly managed, this could lead to duplicate content penalty and one or all sites could be negatively affected.
So what should you do? If you’re dealing with a potential issue of duplicate content within the same site, e.g. landing pages used for Pay per Click, these should be excluded from the natural search results by use of your robots.txt file.
If you have moved from ‘old.domain’ to ‘new.domain’ you should implement a 301 re-direct, i.e. permanent redirect in your .htaccess file. A 301 can also be used to manage ‘old.page’ to ‘new.page’ and acts basically as a sign-post informing the search engines that there has been a change. If used correctly, as well as re-directing the visitor to the correct destination, other factors such as in-bound links and search rankings should carry over to the new location.
There is an excellent article at Google Webmaster Central Blog that discusses dealing with duplicate content in more detail.
