Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

| This News Blog is dedicated to bringing news, information and innovations targeting the Search Engine Optimisation industry.

Duplicate no more

Duplicate content, according to the search engines, is no longer a problem! Then why is it we are presented sites from people almost daily where duplicated content is a problem.
 
So when is a duplicate a duplicate? These are pages that have the same navigation structure and same text content. Duplicates can happen when a web page's content, often provided dynamically, could have the same products but in a different order on multiple URL's, at one time this was enough to constitute duplication. However the more common duplication occurs often by accident, issues surrounding canonicals, alias', test sites and session id's are largely the result of developers and hosts being naive to the consequences.

In truth it isn't that the search engines are penalizing necessarily, it is more that they give credit to the page that is seen as most recent, that page of course may not have sufficient credibility in links to support a good ranking, hence the all too often deterioration of ranking when a duplicate occurs.
 
In February this year the three main engines, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, agreed a new handler called the Canonical Link Element. Placed in the source of a duplicate page it tells the search engine that a specific page has a preferred location.
 
For example, session id's may have a URL like
http://www.xseo.com/page.htm?sid=49583029348
 
by inserting
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.xseo.com/page.htm
 
into the source code, the search engines will understand that the latter page is the preferred location and to ignore the page with the Canonical Link Element text.
 
It must be noted that this will only work in certain circumstances where the content is duplicated in this or a similar manour. As a rule of thumb, if you have duplicate pages on different URL's, however they are created. Measures should be taken to either correct the situation or disallow the search crawlers from indexing the duplicate pages in the first place.

If you are suffering a duplication issue, or suspect you might be, contact us at info@xseo.com and we'll identify it for you.

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