Cincinnati Web Design Solutions Blog

Avoid Self Duplicate Content on Your Website

Posted On:

December 08, 2011

, by Troy Henson

Many SEO issues can be related to duplicate content. If the search engines see the same content in two different places it is possible for them to index the content twice rather than giving the one link the full SEO weight that it deserves. With this in mind, many websites can be considered “watered down” in content to Google and other search engines.

Many things can be done proactively to fix or even prevent duplicate content:

• Change your Content Management System (CMS) to generate only the URLs you want.
• Pick one “canonical” url and ensure your link constantly within your site.
• Make all the non canonical urls do a permanent (301) HTTP redirect to a canonical/preferred URL
• Google’s Webmaster Tools: specify www. vs. non-www
• Break ties in Google by submitting your preferred URL in a Sitemaps file

Google Engineer Matt Cutts on the Canonical element