5 Ways to Ensure Duplicate Content Doesn’t Dupe Your SEO

You can’t dupe the duplicate content filter! However, you can have a fairly serious impact on your SEO by having too much duplicate content on your site, even if it is properly credited and legally allowed. There is ongoing confusion over the best way to deal with duplicate content on your site; here we check out the main methods.

Blocking the content using robots.txt

Duplicate content can’t cause SEO issues if the Googlebots can’t find it. However, this is not always the best option, because if you have inbound links pointing to the duplicate pages, they won’t give you a rankings boost.

Use the noindex/follow tag
There is some debate as to whether you can ask Google not to index the content on the page (noindex), but still follow the links (/follow). However, Google says that it is possible … we can only take their word for it.

301 redirects
These tell the Googlebots to assign all the ranking factors (inbound links, content ranking factors, etc) to the page that your 301 is pointing to. This is only useful if your duplicate content comes from your own site, or from an old version of your site.

Rel=canonical

A 301 redirect can sometimes make for a very strange user experience, where it seems that there are multiple ways to get to the same page. Canonical redirects act like a 301 from Google’s point of view, but don’t actually redirect the user.

Alternate link tag

This allows you to assign ranking factors to a main page like a canonical link, but is mostly used in the context of international or multilingual sites.

Duplicate content is one of the trickier areas of SEO, and dealing with it optimally requires a fair bit of experience in SEO. Web Marketing Experts can get you reliable results in mitigating duplicate content issues, at minimal cost. Give us a call!