Does duplicate content penalty really exist? I don’t know, but most SEO experts say it does. It could send your page to supplementary index. So, let’s avoid having duplicate content.

First of all, what are duplicate contents? Well, the name itself is self explanatory, right? It’s having two pages with the same content. If it’s 3 pages, then, it’s triplicate content, hehehe. Like if you copied some free articles somewhere, I’m sure, you’ll be having this duplicate content problem. If your blog contains copied articles from some other free articles, your blog will not rank high on search engine results pages because of duplicate content penalty.

Now, you might tell me. “I don’t have duplicate content. I write all my blog posts. I don’t copy from others. So, I’m sure I will not get that penalty.” Well, very good if that’s the case. But do you know that some settings in your blog or website setup can trigger duplicate content?

Just look at these examples:

http://www.yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com

You might say that the above example are just 2 ways to reach your site, but to the eyes of the search engines, those are 2 different pages, giving you duplicate content. You can fix this problem by using 301 redirection. All you have to do is redirect either the www to non-www URL or vice versa. Like this blog, typing http://macuha.com will redirect you to http://www.macuha.com. You can find a guide on how to do this here.

Another problem is due to the nature of Wordpress. If you make a blog post, you get your post indexed on the categories page, archive page, main page, and the permalink pages. That’s a whole lot of duplicate pages too. So, how do you solve this? There are many ways to handle this. One is to put nofollow robots meta tag on pages you don’t want to get indexed. Manuel Viloria has details on his blog on how to do this. Another solution which I do is to use the “More” feature of Wordpress so that only the permalink pages contains the full unique content of the post. The other pages will only contain the first few sentences of the posts.

Feeds can also be a source of duplicate content. When your feed is indexed, it is obviously the exact same copy of your posts, right? An obvious duplicate content. So, what to do? Don’t let the feeds get indexed. I blocked my default RSS feeds on this blog by editing the robots.txt file. You can check my robots.txt file to see what I did here. I got this idea from Jozzua.

How about the Feedburner feeds? You can block them too! Here’s how to do it. Simply go to your Feedburner account, go to Publicize tab and go to the NoIndex option. It is listed way down below. From there, you will know what to do. I just discovered this feature while exploring Feedburner.

Ok, enough of this non sense. LOL! Of course this is not non sense. Try applying these to your blog if you haven’t done yet and see if it could improve your search engine rankings. And if it does, give me some mocha frap. LOL!

Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine optimization, duplicate content

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