Posted on June 3, 2008 - by Nate

Duplicate Content: A SERP Conundrum.

In the realm of the internets (I like to use the plural, much like the southerners like to pluralize Wal-Mart to Wal-Marts), there are writers and readers. Naturally those who surf the web often usually do both. Those that are savvy enough, know that a equal dose of both is necessary to keep up in today’s fast paced world. Today, however, I’m going to focus on authoring relevant web content.

So, you’re using web content to drive traffic eh? Great! As you should. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself though.

1. Am I creating content for content’s sake or am I just looking at ways to increase my content so the spiders will think “hey, content this site is better than the others that talk about this particular widget because they have more content” ?

2. Does my content repeat itself exactly in my site…over and over? The spiders are smarter than you think and they even ban people whose site’s contain too much duplication.

3. Is the content relevant to my area of expertise? If so, great. If not, stop putting up garbage on your site just to hopefully drive traffic.

Now, having said all this, I’m going to go through a list of things I gleaned from an article Mark Jones sent me which was written by Gary Hess. He poses the question, How do I spot duplicate content? He gives several ways this can be done:

1. Make sure each page has only one URI that can be found by search engines. If your site must have a print version and a screen version, use your robots.txt file to exclude the pages or add the robots meta tag with noindex attached.
2. Do not copy and paste long paragraphs directly onto your pages. Quotes and paraphrases are fine, but anything longer than a few lines should be taken out. If the page must have the same content as another page, surround it with unique text so Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines can easily distinguish the page.
3. Try to get pages to at least 250 additional words / html tags that are not within the template.
4. Use 301s to redirect old versions of pages to the new version.
5. Keep internal linking consistent. Don’t link to /page/ /page and /page/index.html, choose one and only one. I have seen many websites link their ‘home’ button to /index.html. Don’t make this mistake. It will be seen as duplicate content, and even the 1% chance it isn’t, you will be splitting its Page Rank in two.
6. Use country specific TLDs when the content is country specific. This will not only help deter search engines away from labeling external-internal duplicate content, but will also help with your sites rankings in local searches.
7. Make sure your syndicated content has a link back to the original. This will help search engines decide which is the original.
8. Use the Google webmaster tools and select your preferred www or non-www version.
9. Don’t have empty pages. Many sites have stub pages for future articles that will be expanded. If you must, and I mean must, have these pages, at least block the pages using your robots.txt.
10. Blog/CMS software – understand how your blog or CMS software places its pages. If your site includes an date archive, directory archive, and an index page that shows the latest posts, your site will have duplicate content problems. Make sure to block the pages that will least likely to rank high and leave only one.
11. If a page is ranking better than your original, consider filing a DMCA request to claim ownership of your content within all search engines.

Final Thoughts

So, don’t get too caught up in the hum drum of always trying to place more and more content on your website. Especially if it’s just a repeat of what you placed there ten minutes ago. Everyone hates spam, including the webcrawlers and search engines, so forget it. However, keep on blogging because you never know when some customer is going to be looking for the very specific niche thing you blogged about 3 years ago. It can be an effective tool.

Remember, too much duplicate content can even mean being blocked completely from SERPs (search engine results pages). So, clean it up and get optimized! For more hints on SEO visit Enflate.