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Step 5 - Avoid Duplicate Content
 Be careful not to put the exact same content on different pages
A very common issue for website developers is duplicate content. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and your rankings could take a hit if you either knowingly or inadvertently created a substantial amount of duplicate content.
Duplicate content is considered to be the exact same or even similar on-page elements that display on multiple URLs. Every web page has its own name and address (this is the URL) and so it only makes sense to make the content on each of these unique pages totally different. More...
 Duplicate content can hurt your organic positioning
If your site has multiple pages with the same content, either through a content management system that creates duplicate content or through separate navigation, you may be hurting those pages, diminishing the effect of the link anchor text and reducing the changes of ranking well. More...
"Hmm...is someone trying to trick me with the same content?"
"Folks, I'm the brilliant Spider-man; I was made to get to the bottom of this!"
 What do search engine robots do in the face of duplicate content?
When crawling your site, they will likely select a particular page out of the identical copies and remove the others from the index. However, a massive amount of duplicate content could seriously inhibit the crawling process.
Remember, a huge part of great SEO is making it easy for robots to feed on your unique, relevant, clean coded HTML content. Keep in mind that only if duplicate content is running rampant throughout your site, then this issue becomes urgent. More...
 Handling duplicate content issues
- Check to see that your shopping cart software isn’t generating different URLs for the same product
- Remove past versions of web pages that reside at old URLs
- Web pages with various tracking tag add-ons should be removed from the search engine index altogether
 Are search engine robots really that brilliant?
No, actually they're not as brilliant as Mr. Spider-man claims. As we've said before, search engine spiders only seek unique text and links. So, when they come across duplicate content they single out these pages as a canonical issue. In the following example, let’s say that you know full well that these different URLs all point to your home page:
- http://www.myhomepage.com
- http://www.myhomepage.com/default.aspx
- http://myhomepage.com/default.aspx
The canonical issue is that search engine spiders do NOT know that these four URLs are all pointing to the same page. More...
 Bonus tips for dealing with duplicate content:
- Check if you have duplicate content by typing in your URL first as http://myhomepage.com and now with the “www” http://www.myhomepage.com. What happens? Did the URLs redirect to a favorite form or did nothing happen?
- Ok, so if your home page shows up with more than one URL, then you can remedy this with following solutions:
- Use a 301 re-direct: This will point all versions to a single place. A 301 re-direct tells the search engines which version is your favorite. More...
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Unlock the full version of Step 5: Avoid Duplicate Content to learn a variety of techniques for resolving your duplicate content issues.
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