Duplicate content, how to make your blog a safer place for Search Engine spiders.
December 1, 2007 by zam
Filed under Blogging Tips
What is duplicate content?
Search engines are always trying to improve their search result for better user experience.
Duplicate content wastes space in their index database, processing power and time on indexing the content. This is why the search engine spiders decide which of the pages with the same content is the most important one and the other page gets de-indexed.
Just so you get the picture, I had a Blogger.com blog and had reposted some copied articles from free article directories and within a day google de-indexed the whole blog from the search results and banned the Url!
So how do you make sure your blog will not get panelized because of having duplicate content even though you don’t have any? Here I have a helping hand for you.
Duplicate content and Archive pages
Having an archive page can help your visitors to check out all your old posts and might help Google bot to determine you have duplicate content! When Google bot visits your blog, it can find the same content first on the post then on archive page and finally on the index page. Possibilities are it might mark your content as duplicate.
So how do you fix the mess?
The simplest way is, not to archive your posts. Then there is the fear of bad navigation. So what do you do? All we can do is we can make sure when Google bot visits the blog it does not crawl the archive page. Use nofollow meta tag on the archive template. Just add the following code.
Or if you are not a big techie and aren’t comfortable with editing the code, you can download the plugin Duplicate content Cure and upload it to your plugins directory. Once you are done just make sure you get it activated. That’s it.
Duplicate categories
Don’t tag a particular post in more than one category and you get rid of duplicate categories. It’s as simple as that.
Having a wordpress blog might be a trouble
I recommend you to read the post How to make your wordpress blog duplicate content safe, written by Oleg Ishenko, the owner of SeoSearcher.com. It’s an amazing read.
Adding a 301 redirect to your domain
If your site can be accessed by http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com you should add the following code to your .htaccess file.
Read the posts here on Get rid of your duplicate content and on blog seo avoid duplicate content for more information
Note: Replace your domain name with mine.
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Hi TJ. Thanks for this posting article.
What blogger.com user can do for this duplicate content if we never doing duplicate content, but google isn’t indexing our post? What do you mean by “Just add the following code.” I’m not seeing a code there.
Thank you.
Surya,
Thanks for dropping by. I don’t have that much idea about blogger blogs. If Google isn’t indexing the posts - possibilities are the same.
Did you submit your blog to Google? If you haven’t submitted yet, you must submit your blog to all the major search engines first and wait for some time. If you have submitted but google doesn’t index your posts, may be that’s because Google takes a little while to index the pages. Or may be someone is copying your posts and publishing else where.
But to prevent you can’t place the code on blogger blog because as far as I know blogger users doesn’t have access to their .htaccess file which can be found on the hosting folder directory.
If you are serious about blogging you should definitely consider a wordpress blog hosted on a webhost because it’s impossible to survive with a free blog. wordpress lets you customize with a hell lot of plugins and enables you to have a safe blog.
So if you want my honest opinion, I gotta say, go grab a domain which costs only $8.99-$9.29 (.com) a year and grab a hosting just so you don’t have to kick yourself later.
Prevention is better than cure
[...] because wordpress creates duplicate contents when you sleep! So how do you get rid of it? Read this post to get an idea and add the following codes to your robot.txt [...]