Fresh content is key to maintaining your ranking, but constantly adding content to your website can pose a problem when it comes to duplication. As your website gets more complex, it can be incredibly difficult to monitor for duplicate pages and duplicate page content.

E-commerce sites are particularly vulnerable to being kicked off a search engine’s index due to content duplicating. Search engines have complained that many e-commerce sites create multiple links to products which trigger the search engine’s duplicate content filters. Such things can be avoided with a little ironing out of any bugs in your system.

If your site records session IDs, these can create duplicate content. Keep an eye out for ’sid’s at the end of URLs which the search engine might cache separately each time it makes a visit to your page. For sites that feature products pages, a different URL is sometimes cached when the product is approached from the search form or a list. Ensure that your links all lead back to the one page for each product. Similarly, whenever you have a list which can be sorted there is a risk of multiple URLs being created for the one version of content.

There are a number of tools out there to help track down duplicate content on your page, but it always helps to have expert advice from a consultant, particularly if you are operating a complex e-commerce site.

Duplicate content doesn’t just occur through the operations on a site. Updating content regularly means that there is a risk of duplication, even when you’re the one providing all of the content. Outsourcing for your content increases the risk of duplicate content. Content checkers are useful tools in tracking down other sites using your content, or sites that are using content you have outsourced. Particularly in the latter case, it can be impossible to get other sites to remove content that duplicates yours. Google does have a system in place to claim ownership of content, but the best and simplest way is to rewrite it.

Interestingly enough, a Google webmaster has admitted that Google won’t recognise content that has been translated from another language as duplicate content. This is interesting news for pages that want to appeal to a global market, although Google may soon catch up with this little loophole.

Google has also said that content that is duplicated in regular and ‘printer’ formats isn’t generally considered to break the rules. If such content is found to be there solely for SEO purposes, however, as opposed to helping the human viewers of the site, it can still trigger the duplicate content filter. How this is decided is still up for debate, but intent seems to factor greatly in Google’s filtering methods. It is recommended if you do make use of ‘printer’ versions of content that you guide the search engine’s algorithm to index your preferred document. SEO Consult can help you to fine-tune the versions of content present on your site so as not to trigger duplicate content filters.

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