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Welcome to the Creare SEO Video Blog, Today we are going to discuss the effects of duplicate content on your search engine optimisation campaign.

Firstly we are going to have a look at the guidelines set by Google and see what Google treats as duplicate content.

“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” - Google Webmaster Guidelines

It does explain that some duplicate content is innocent and that it can be resolved using canonicalisation techniques, which we will discuss in the coming weeks.

Google’s guidelines suggest that duplicate content is designed to drive more traffic to essentially the same site, but more importantly from a commercial perspective if you copy a competitors content you will have legal implications too.

So why is duplicate content so bad for Google, Well like any bad practice Google looks down on it, meaning that your site will be penialised or “sandboxed”. This essentially means that it will not list in Google for some or all of your sites keyphrases.

Google, myself and James recommend the following to avoid duplicate content:

1.) Use a robots file to guide Search Engines into the sections of your site you want to get indexed. (disallowing printable versions maybe)

2.) Be consistent with internal and external linking, as mentioned on a previous video blog about seo friendly redirects, Google can sometimes treat the same content as different pages. (linking to the /index.php, Be consistent)

3.) Use top level country specific domains to allow Google to know what country you intend to target. (.co.uk/ .de rather than .com/uk and .com/de)

4.) Use webmaster tools to specific how to index your site.

5.) Minimize boilerplate repetition - dont have a massive copyright disclaimer on each page.

6.) Avoid publishing ‘stubs’ or empty template pages

7.) Modify your CMS system if it produces random DB queries.

8.) Avoid using similar text throughout your site - don’t copy someone elses or other pages from your web site.

9.) If you didn’t write the text, check it using copy scape. http://www.copyscape.com/

Thanks for watching.