Duplicate content
January 23rd, 2008 by Dan
From an SEO and a Search Engine point of view, content is king and duplicate content is very, very bad. Just like in the real world people don’t want to hear you going on and on about the same thing, therefore search engines use their algorithms to analyse your content. They are looking for fresh, original and up to date content and frown upon content that is duplicate.This has a series of SEO consequences, unfortunately duplicate content is sometimes necessary especially on large sites, for example product pages where descriptions are similar except for some small details I.e. colour or size. Another example of duplicate content is print friendly pages, one that many people miss, this is considered duplicate content and can effect your search engine results. To combat these you can use a robots.txt file, this is a file placed in the main directory of your site that a search engine spider will identify automatically and can limit which pages the spider indexes.
Duplicated content is not just limited to your visible text, it also applies to Meta and title tags, these should vary from page to page to give accurate descriptions of the page and its content.
There are two more methods to stop spiders indexing duplicate content worth mentioning, these are noindex and nofollow placed in the meta tags. noindex tells a spider this page shouldn’t be indexed and nofollow, stating that the link with the page shouldn’t be followed. In conclusion duplicate content can severely affect your ranking so all of the methods are good practice for any Search Engine Optimisation.
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