Unique content is a must for any website whose owner wishes to improve its rankings. Without it, your site is not seen as important as a site with unique content. Google doesn’t know which site wrote the content originally, so it penalises both sites instead, so it’s your job to continually check your sites for content that may have been copied by another website.

Along with content from other websites, you should also check for duplicate content within your own website too. One of the areas to check is the Meta descriptions. Each page in your site should have a unique description so Google can understand what that page is based upon. If you have duplicate Meta descriptions then Google can’t determine which of the pages that has duplicate content is more important, so the ranking of both pages falls.

You should also keep an eye on your page titles, especially if the pages are dynamically generated, and/or you have a lot of pages. Your page title is part of the text search engine users will see when they do a search. If your site comes up, the first bit of text they are likely to look at is the title. If your title doesn’t contain the information they’re looking for, chances are they’ll move on to the next result. This applies especially if your titles simply contain the name of your site and nothing else. You should ensure the page title is relevant to the content on the page, and it is unique to every other page on the site.

You may have duplicate content on your site without realising, because of an issue known as “canonicalisation”. This occurs when a single page on your site is accessible from several variations of your URL. Normally this happens when you access the pages with www. in the URL and without www. in the URL, or when your index page doesn’t redirect to your full domain name, leaving the filename in the URL.

Example:

• http://www.domain.com
• http://www.domain.com/index.html
• http://domain.com/index.html
• http://domain.com

All of these URL’s redirect to the same page, so there are 4 versions of the same URL visible to the search engines. You can often fix this by using a .htaccess file and a re-write rule.

Get Involved