Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

A couple weeks ago I posted a Blog on Google Speaking out on Duplicate Content Issues, I am back today to address that topic once again.  There a few things that I can make clearer for you to help you keep the duplicate content penalty from getting you.When checking your site make sure you look for these items these are things that set off a red flag for duplicate content:

• canonical issues (www and non-www version);
  Search engines may think www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com are two different sites. You should set up a permanent redirect (technically called a “301 redirect”) between these sites. Once you do that, you will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website. Check Link Split at: http://www.marketleap.com/
  
• pagination when different pages have identical titles and meta description;
  Each page of your site should have a unique set of Title, Description and Meta tags that clearly represents the content on that page.
  

• various versions of the home page (e.g. www.site.com and www.site.com/index.php);
  This is an easy one to over look.  All your home links should point back to a absolute link such as http://www.yoursite.com vs. http://www.yoursite.com/index.html

There is a free tool I found that will help you identifying if your site has duplicate content.  It will check the following:

• www and non-www header response;
• Google cache check;
• Similarity check;
• Default page check;
• 404 header response;
• PageRank dispersion check (i.e. if www and non-www versions have different PR).

Check it out: http://www.virante.com/seo-tools/duplicate-content.php 

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