Yesterday’s WebProNews Video is all about duplicate content, and it got me thinking. We all know duplicate content isn’t a good thing, and this video drew my attention with the title: “How to Avoid Duplicate Content”. Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive gives some interesting and straightforward advice about how to avoid duplicate content.

The first thing that struck me was her assertion that you must ‘be proactive’ and ‘be consistent’ – this is such common sense advice that I can immediately see the merit in it. The advice to be consistent with your information architecture makes perfect sense to me too, by ensuring that you follow a logical and consistent structure to your sites you can ensure that they will not only be easier to crawl, but you can also lead the search engine to crawl the pages you want them to. This leads nicely to the third point from Thurow – “Link consistently to the same URLs” – if you link to the shortest, most keyword rich URL then you are giving the search engines the best URL and don’t forget this is also the one your visitors will want too.

You should always send consistent messages to the search engines regarding which pages they should index, because they will undoubtedly choose the wrong file to show in the SERPs.

Thurow makes the point that one could upload several files with almost identical content, but with the use of CSS these pages can look totally different to one another, (CSS Zen Garden is a prime example of this), a human visitor can look at the pages and see that they look different, but the search engine only has the html code to go on. So the search engine uses the only information they have available and class the pages as duplicate content. You should make sure that each page on your website has content that is dramatically different, as this is the only way to avoid falling into the duplicate content trap.

Thurow goes on to say that the canonical tag is both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse because SEO spammers regularly abuse it. It is a blessing when used correctly, and for the purpose it was designed for, it allows users to filter CMS sites easily, which you’ll appreciate is a blessing in itself.

Takeaway

So, to avoid duplicate content, the very best thing you can do is apply your common sense, look at your site logically and be consistent and proactive. Give the search engines as much information and help as you can and they will index the pages you want them to index. At all costs, avoid giving the search engines conflicting information though, as this will only result in disaster.

Script:

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.

I spend some of my time at work reviewing customers’ websites that have slipped back in the SERPs. The reasons behind the slipping could be anything: Perhaps the competition has been upping their game to increase their backlinks, or, their copy is more keyword rich than ours, or, maybe Google has just had a blip? It’s my job to find out why the site has slipped and to do the work (or recommend to someone else what needs to be done) to push the site back to its rightful position as number 1, page 1 (we accept nothing less!)

Initially I will do a range of checks to assess what needs to be done to improve the site. The first thing I’ll do is check out the competition, asking myself these kinds of questions:

• How many backlinks do they have?
• Can I get backlinks from the same place as them?
• Does their site look better than ours? (Usually, the answer to this question is a very definite “NO!”)
• What’s their content like, is it ‘salesy’ or is it bland and boring? Is it better than ours?

Once I’ve answered these questions, got a load of backlinks and checked the functionality of our site I will do a test for Duplicate Content.

The negative effect of Duplicate Content on SEO

I use Copyscape to find out if someone has copied our customers’ content. I am sorry to say I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve found duplicate content present on struggling sites. Plagiarism has a very real and negative effect on websites.

Sometimes Google thinks the site being copied is the one that has done the copying, and so penalises the wrong site. The Moral is: If you have difficulty writing your copy, whatever you do, don’t copy someone else’s! It may seem like a good idea at the time, but it’s really not.

If your site has been plagiarised then you can follow the steps recommended by Copyscape. However, by that stage, you’re probably best re-writing your copy anyway to ensure that it has original content. Quite often this is enough to bring the site back to where it should be. But, you do have to wait for indexing, which can be agonising!

To prevent plagiarism from happening again, Copyscape has a list of steps to follow. We always place a © declaration in the footer of all our sites, but this deterrent isn’t as effective online as it should be. The only way to ensure your content doesn’t get copied is to regularly update it. This is generally good for SEO anyway; so there really is no harm in it, just more work for the honest Webmaster.

I often come across sites where it is obvious they are trying to optimise for certain keywords but end up reading really badly, which isn’t the way to get sales. So, if you don’t think your own writing skills are up to scratch then employ an experienced content writer. But, assuming you feel you are up to the job, then read on and learn some of the tools to ensure your site has the very best content you can get.

Content is, in my opinion, the most important part of Search Engine Optimisation. It is what your web visitors are looking for when they search for your site and it is what the search engines evaluate in order to rank your web site.  It is extremely important that you have excellent, compelling content on your web site. The quality of your content is directionally proportional to the likelihood of your site listing well, and more importantly, whether your potential customers are going to buy from you or employ your services.

•    Write for people NOT search engines

Search engines are machines, but they do know the difference between well written, naturally flowing text and awkward over-optimised drivel. More importantly, so do people, and people can choose to spend their money wherever they like, and if they don’t like the sound of your site they will certainly click elsewhere, and consequently end up buying from your competitors.

All the traffic in the world isn’t going to mean a thing if you’re site doesn’t make the conversion from traffic to sales, so if you have high traffic but low sales then the very best thing you can do is take a look at you’re text. Does it read well, do you make it clear what you want the consumer to do?

Make sure your content is structured with the reader in mind. Think of your site as a salesperson – albeit one that works incredibly hard – 24/7! But would you want your salesperson talking drivel to sell your products? Probably not, especially if it was all day every day. You need to answer any questions the potential customer may have regarding your product. List the benefits of your product, don’t get too slogany, give them facts and be reasonable. Ask yourself what concerns you may have if you were a consumer, and answer those questions. What is great about your product? How will it make a difference to people’s lives? By answering these types of questions you will be able to alleviate some of the concerns a potential customer may have regarding your product or service, this is guaranteed to increase your sales.

•    Keep the content current

Search engines like fresh content, so do returning visitors. Nobody likes visiting a ‘news’ page to find the last bit of ‘news’ was written in 2007. Current content is the key to maintaining listings and achieving high search engine rankings. There are many ways to achieve this, use RSS, write new content regularly, set up a forum on your site, and give your users a chance to interact with your site. It’ll pay off in the long run.

•    Avoid Duplicate content

Duplicate content is penalised by the search engines. More importantly, they don’t have the capabilities of determining who wrote the content first. To check if your site has duplicate content you can use this nifty tool copyscape to discover if your site has been copied. Copyscape give you advice on how to deal with duplicate content if you have become a victim of this.

Content written for the purposes of search engine optimisation, or SEO, is written to achieve organic rankings. Web sites with keyword-rich, naturally flowing, original content are judged by the search engines to be better web sites. By taking your content seriously (and I have had many a client who seem to think it just appears out of nowhere) you are taking your customers seriously. This could be the difference between getting sales and not getting sales, simple as that.

A final note: Check your spellings.

Online spell checker : http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/spell_check.htm

After coming across the canonical link element in February i hadn’t yet found a use for this tag / element. But now i believe i have. Basically it is designed to tell Google which page is the true version of potentially a wide range of domain combination or DB queries. For example Google could potentially see the following as different pages (this is important within SEO):

domain.com
domain.com/
domain.com/index.php
domain.com/default.asp
www.domain.com
www.domain.com/index.php
www.domain.com/default.asp
www.domain.com/

You get the basic idea….

So i here you ask how do i let Google know which page is the correct version, well before you start doing any crazy 301 re-direct’s or use the canonical link element, if possible you should be consistent from the start meaning:

• Always link to the same domain
• Use a .htaccess re-write your domain
• Set up the correct domain in Webmaster Tools
• Consistent Internal Linking

If you have followed these simple steps you will have no need to use the canonical link element, however if you free you potentially have duplicate content issues with you CMS or ecommerce platform all you need to do is add the following code in your <head></head> tags.

<link rel=”canonical” rel=”http://www.yourdomain.com” />

Google will trust that you have used this correctly and unless you have made a mistake i.e. created a infinite loop. It will assume that this command is correct. This tag is only based for sites that you fear may have duplicate content issue, any other issues can be solved with 301 re-directs.

Remember also that you can only use the canonical element internally and sub domains, NOT external websites.

References:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/canonical-link-element-presentation.html