Google Advice on Dealing with Duplicate Content Issues

By Michael Finnegan

Account Executive

Google Advice on Dealing with Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content can affect your ranking on Google and other search engines if you’re not aware of the potential issues.  There are several reasons that duplicate content could become an issue for a site.  Apart from the obvious (other sites copying content from your site), the problem could originate from duplicate content within your site(s).  For example, many companies have separate sites for several international markets – the problem arises when these sites have identical or very similar content on one or more pages of the site.  This can also be a problem for shopping sites who sell products using manufacturers descriptions that could be used on many other sites also.

Google penalises sites that are seen to have duplicate content because they don’t want to have multiple results with the same content showing for searchers queries as this could take away from the user experience.  This could potentially mean that Google would choose one site to display in the search results and ignore the other site.  For example, if you had a US and UK site with the same content, you could potentially end up with just one site showing up in the search results which could be disastrous!

Google offer some advice on their Google Webmaster Central Blog on how to prevent penalties arising from duplicate content.  The following are the main points to take into account:

·    Block content appropriately – If you’ve got the same content in more than one place, e.g. you provide printable versions of articles on your site, you should block whichever version you don’t want Google to rank using your robots.txt file rather than let them decide for you.

·    301 Redirects - If you’ve changed or restructured site, use 301 (permanent) redirects in the .htaccess file to redirect the Googlebot to the new pages/site.

·    Top Level Domains – Should be used for country-specific content.  Google is more likely to recognise, for example, Irish content if .ie is used rather than .com/ie or ie.example.com

·    Careful Syndication - If your content is syndicated on other sites they should include a link back to the original content and even then Google will choose which version they deem to be most appropriate for a particular search.

·    Boilerplate Repetition – This should be minimised by briefly summarising copyright text, for example, at the end of each page and including a link to a detailed page rather than including the full text at then end of each page.

By following these steps and being aware of potential instances of content duplication you shouldn’t have too many problems.  Also, Google explain that if you are concerned about other sites taking content from your site that you are unlikely to be negatively impacted – although the other site might be!  If you do feel that you have been negatively impacted you can claim ownership of your content by filing a DMCA request.  For more information on duplicate content and other issues visit Google Webmaster Central Blog.