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Poor Search Engine Rankings Caused by Duplicate Content Issues
by Carsten Cumbrowski
More SEO Articles
Published on this site: August 28th, 2007 - See
more articles from this month
Introduction:
It is a problem to have identical or near duplicate
versions of a webpage available at more than one URL, on
one web site or many.
This can be an unintentional issue, because of site
architecture etc., or something the webmaster is well aware
of, such as syndicated contend and scraped/illegally copied
content from other websites.
- Canonical URLs
The problem with Canonical URLs, which refers to the issue
where the site URLs with and without "www." Are valid and
return the same content, is not too much of an issue today,
because many webmasters are aware of it.
Google even has a tool in its Webmaster Central application
for webmasters to specify which version is the primary one
-- the one with "www." or the one without. The webmaster
does not have to make any changes to a site code for that.
He should, though, because other search engines do not
provide a mechanism like Google's.
The solution for this is to specify one of the two versions
as the "primary one" and 301 redirect requests to the
other. You can accomplish this by code within the web site
application or by using special ISAPI filters, such as
Helicon's "ISAPI Rewrite" on Microsoft IIS web servers or
specifying URL rewrites (mod rewrite) in the ".htaccess"
file on Apache web servers.
Bigger concerns are things when it comes to pages with the
same content but more than one URL because of the sites
architecture. There are various reasons for causing
duplicate URLs for the same content. I recommend consulting
with a SEO firm for an evaluation of your site, if you
suspect duplicate content on your own website.
- Website Scrapers and Content Theft
It also became much easier for black-hat SEO to create
scraper-sites with the increased popularity of RSS, the
ease of syndication and aggregation and "mash-ups".
Scraper sites are sites that are thrown together as quickly
and as automated as possible to either rank well directly
or get users to click on contextual Ads like Google AdSense
and generate revenue. The chances are high, because the Ads
are the only text that often makes some sense compared to
the gibberish produced by the scraper.
Another goal of a scraper site could also be to boost
indirectly the ranking of a more hidden site. The scraper
site simply links to that other web site from multiple
pages.
Those sites are a bad experience for the user in most cases
and Search Engines try the get rid of them in their index
as good as they can. Because of this struggle, become legit
webmasters more often a victim of the circumstances than
they should what increases fear and mistrust between search
engines and webmasters.
- Duplicate Content Detection
There are some duplicate content detection tools for
webmasters available. Not just to detect duplicates on your
own site, but also stolen content from your site by
scrapers and other webmasters. One popular and free web
based tool is Copyscape.com.
- Legal Steps against Content Theft
There is not very much you can do about scraped and stolen
content from your site, but it makes sense in some of the
cases to have your lawyer send a DMCA notice to the
copyright infringing webmaster and also his hosting
provider (if known).
You can download the details of the federal Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) at the following URL at
Loc.gov: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf
Carsten Cumbrowski: Is an internet marketer, entrepreneur
and web developer with years of experience in the industry.
He has a resources website at Cumbrowski.com for marketers
and developers.See for example the following resources.
Duplicate Content
http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/seo_duplicate_content_iss
ues.asp
Web Master Resources (e.g. to 301 Redirection)
http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/seo_webmaster_techtools.a sp
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