subject: Duplicate Content: How To Solve Duplicate Content Problems On Your Site [print this page] When duplicate content issues appear on your site, you might be surprised to learn even similar content can be deemed as duplicate in the eyes of search engines. The question now arises - how do you deal with this problem? What steps can you take to make sure your site isn't affected by the duplicate content filters? There are things you can do to help you avoid these issues and they don't take too much time to implement.
However, before we begin, there's one thing worth mentioning - the fact that duplicate or similar content cannot get a site penalized or banned from the search engine result pages. Many website owners fear that search engines, especially bigger ones like Google, will penalize their site and drop it completely from their index. This assumption is wrong.
Search engines create different filters that deal with different issues. So, for duplicate content, there is no penalty nor chance of getting banned and dropped from the index, but a filter that is supposed to filter out all duplicate and similar content. When duplicate/similar content is filtered, search engines try to find the website from which the content originated and rank it higher on their pages.
Here are some tips and precautions you can take to make sure that your site does not have any duplicate content:
1. Avoid pagination, and instead try to put the full article on one page.
2. If you rewrite your URLs, make sure that you 301 the old ones to avoid the URLs being indexed under the old and the new URLs.
3. Canonical URLs - some search engines can see your website as two different sites if you have both mysite.com and www.mysite.com. This leads to many problems, because your links and domain authority gets split in half. The solution is simple - just redirect one URL to the other.
4. If you have an affiliate site, Google might see it as a duplicate content. In order to make it more "thick", you have to write new, unique content to it, do as much as you can to make it "textually" different.
5. RSS feeds can sometimes bring trouble to site owners, as people who publish your feeds can steal your content. To avoid this issue, you can offer partial RSS feed.
6. If you find your content somewhere else on the web, without any mentions of your site or a link to it, you can file a DMCA request with the site's host to take it down. You can also report this issue to Google.
7. And last, but not the least - an obvious tip is to always write unique content, that will be helpful to your readers. Writing new, unique content will bring you natural, relevant, quality links that will further push your site to rank higher on the search engines.
If you pay special attention to these 7 tips, you can avoid having duplicate content issues on your site, and save yourself a lot of time, headache and stress.
