On Page Optimization - Avoiding Duplicate Content

f you fully optimized your website and everything looks good on it but you’re not getting ranked, it’s probably because you have duplicate content. Duplicate content is the reproduction of the same text an existing website has to your website or web page. This is the “killer” of SEO. You could be guaranteed that you won’t get high ranked, indexed, and in some cases even banned from search engines result pages. Don’t try to outsmart search engines because believe it or not, they’re a lot smarter than most people think. Here’s how to avoid having duplicate content.

301 Redirects

If you own many domain names that resemble your main domain name make sure to 301 redirect them because search engines see that as duplicate content (if you share the same content on all of them). Let’s say your main domain is www.example.org but you also own www.example.com, www.example.net, www.examples.com, and so on, I recommend 301 redirecting them to www.example.org. By doing so, you’re telling the search engine that the page he landed on is permanently redirected to your main URL. Using a 301 redirect will automatically redirect both visitors and search engines to your main website.

“www” vs “non-www”

Using both your “www” and your “non-www” domain at the same time is not good for SEO rankings. Search engines see that as 2 pages that have the same content, therefore it is considered duplicate content. Choose which domain you would prefer your visitors and search engines to see and stick to it. You could tell the search engine which URL you would like him to follow by using the Google Webmaster Tools.
Here is a method to 301 redirect the “non-www” to the “www” website version.
In your .htaccess file, add the following (of course replacing “mysite.com” with your own domain name):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Internal Linking  (Root Linking)

Every website has 2 or more home page versions in the URL. You have www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html (or php etc..) These URL’s are the same page and contain the same content. The solution to all this is using a rel=”canonical” link to your main domain. Let’s say the home page you want is www.example.com. So your canonical setup should look something like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/” />

This way your telling the search engine that no matter which page he falls on, this is the one that you want to get indexed for and appear in the results.

Identical Content
If you have a business competitor and you see that his website has a better ranking than yours, you can get the idea of copy-pasting his content to improve your rankings. If you do that, you can be sure you won’t get indexed and maybe banned. Since your competitor’s website is already indexed and high ranked, the search engine will know that his text was here before yours and therefore will flag your website for a review.