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Handling duplicate content

Posted in: Blog, Hosting News, Web Design by Paul McEwan on March 10, 2010

Trying to increase search engine relevance by duplicating content within a website is an old trick that search engines figured out a long time ago. In those days some SEO people went so far as to duplicate and publish the website hundreds of times with links all point ot one final landing page at the real site. If you try that today, it will not only fail but it will set you to the back of the SEO bus. When building a new website or signing up to a template site where all the content is provided (and therefore duplicated hundreds of times), sooner or later handling the duplicate content needs to be dealt with. How do we do this? Let me count the ways. If you are signing up to a site where all the content is provided then please edit it all. Every last bit. No time? Hide the pages you will come back to later. If you have a high traffic web site receiving most of the visits and another one you are planning to move to as a new re-designed website, (giving it a new URL and a fresh new look),  then you don’t want to lose all that traffic from that old site. But you can’t keep both sites online because they will have duplicate content and that is something often penalized by search engines. How do you proceed? The best practice is to do a 301 redirect. The 301 message on the Internet is handled by the search engine as: moved permanently. Here is how you can make a 301 redirect for your web page: With PHP: The code needs to be placed in the Header section of the website, so that the search engine can read it first. Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” ); Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” ); With .htaccess: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^old\.php$ http://www.domain.com/new.php [R=permanent,L] The code above will direct all the traffic from the old.php to the new.php page. With the rel=”canonical” directive: If you run an online store and want to sell a custom made handbag, which is available in several colors, and decide to dedicate a separate page on your site for each color, then you have about 3 or 4 identical pages. You can use the rel=”canonical” element to direct all traffic to the page with the most popular color. This will lead a search engine to point all the traffic from the similar pages to the page you have specified. This code needs to be placed in the header section of all the web pages you wish to lead somewhere else. With the URL Redirection Manager in the Web Hosting Control Panel: If you don’t like to meddle with code, or with new file creation, or anything like that, you can use the handy URL Redirection Manager available with all our shared web hosting plans, where a simple web interface will allow you to choose which pages to be redirected and what redirection code to be used. Don't forget to contact us if you need any help with this or anything else.