Reducing duplication to improve your SEO

As most people will know, having duplicate content on your site can harm your search engine rankings. This is mainly true for directly copying from another website, however, there are other forms of duplication that can cause a loss of rankings or may potentially lead to a site becoming banned.

One of these is internal page duplication; this is mainly present on poorly designed content management systems and blogs where the content is pulled in from globally assigned variables from the database that can be accessed via multiple URLs. For example, if you have a blog post that is being displayed on the front page with a hyperlink to read more, the search engines will cache both instances of the content causing duplication. However, there’s no need to be concerned as there is a very simple fix for this: you can place a noindex nofollow on these internal duplicate pages, or, if possible, place a 301 redirect on them back to the original source page.

So, in conclusion, it would be wise to be aware of the issues that internal content duplication can cause, however there are many solutions to these issues that are easy to implement that will improve your chances of gaining a higher listing in the search engines.

Adam Wood
ASP/SEO Programmer and Hosting Contact