Duplicate content is one of the biggest dangers for good SEO. Get it wrong, and pages identified with duplicate content in your web site might just end up in Google’s Sandbox. This is a dim and remote place where Google indexes domains that are never to be found. Well, you can always find a sandboxed page by typing its exact url in the search box. Not Good!

For those who don’t know it yet, duplicate content referes to substantive blocks of content in your domain that closely match other content. When a crawler visits your domain, it is programmed to detect differences in content. If it deems that certain pages are mostly identical in content, it will identify them as cases of duplicate content. There are two types of duplicate content: internal duplicate content, which is when search engines recognize very similar pages from one domain, and external, which is when multiple copies exist across multiple domains.

Why is this bad? Well the consequences can be pretty harmful from a SEO point of view. A page identified with duplicate content will not rank for any keyword, will not pass link reputation, and will not bring any page rank to any other page. Also, if you have the exact same content as other domains, search engines may not even display your page. The more sites have the same content, the lower are your chances of appearing in search results. Again, not good!

Here are a few hints on how to avoid this case.

Templates

Templates are considered as duplicates, so be careful. For search engines, the navigation menu, the footer and the header, which are usual parts of a template, look like duplicate content. There is not much you can do about that. The template is to be found in every page of your domain, so what can you do avoid this? In a page you have your template content, but also the content unique to the page in question, and which is not part of the template. So you want to make sure that the number of words used for the content outisde of the template is superior to the number of words used in yout template. If your templates use 200 words, but that the rest of the content for a page uses 230 words, then you’ll be in the safe zone. So make sure to control the word density of your template content vs non template content for every page of your domain.

Meta title & description

Avoid using identical titles and descriptions tags for every pages of your domain. And there is no point in differentiating your title or description with just generic words such as « an », « in », or « how ». Those are called stop words, and are completely ignored by search engines. So for a search engine these two titles are identical: MBonte.com: all about SEO & MBonte.com: all on SEO.

Here is the list of stop words: I, a, about, an, are, as, at, be, by, com, de, en, for, from, how, in, is, it, la, of, on, or, htat, the, this, to, was, what, when, where, who, will, with, und, www. So there is no point in using those.

Try to use a descriptive and unique title & description for each of your pages. This is simple enough to do, and will avoid your domain a great deal of trouble with search engines, and the search results for your pages will be much more relevant. You want that!

Multiple URLs

Many sites have multiple copies of their homepage accessible to vistors, and indexed in search engines. For instance, for the present site we could have these different versions: http://mbonte.com, http://www.mbonte.com, or http://www.mbonte.com/fr/index.

These are all different URLs, and each are counted as different URLs. If some sites link to the www.mbonte.com version, some to the mbonte.com and so on, links to the same page are split across three URLs. So what could have been nine links pointing to one page could be just three links pointing to three. And Google will only display one in search engines, so it picks one, and attributes only three links to it. You’ll hence lose link juice, which are very important for search engines in determining rankings.

If this is the case for your domain, you should decide on a single URL and setup 301 permanent redirects to notify search engines to pass the link credit from all pages that redirect to the page you choose.

There are other issues of duplicate content, and only a few were described in this article. But what must known here, is that duplicate content should not be taken lightly. Here is little tool that will help you identify duplicate content in your web site: Copyscape.