Google hates duplicate content

16 March 2009

Duplicate content is very frowned upon by Google. In fact Google hates it.

Duplicate content within the same website often happens when:

  • There is more than one way to access the same content - I am not talking about navigation methods to get to the same page, but having the same content on 2 different URLs.
  • A website has a re-build or re-design - If the navigation works differently then you will be re-creating old pages, just on a different URL.
  • The home page - A lot of people don't know this or simply dismiss the fact, but every web page can display the home page at 4 different URLs:

    • www.mywebpage.com
    • www.mywebpage.com/index.php
    • mywebpage.com
    • mywebpage.com/index.php

    As you can see these 4 URLs exist for every website and will all show the same page (If using a Windows based server it may be index.asp, or if they're just HTML pages it may be index.htm or index.html).

Duplicate content can be avoided by using the robots.txt file to block some pages from Google crawling them, or by using 301 (Permanent) redirects, usually in the htaccess (or equivalent) file.

Duplicate content between 2 different websites will penalise the second website that displays the content, because the chances are if a website has already published the same content, then it must be the second website that is duplicating the content.

http://www.peternichol.com/entry/trackback/53/

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Current comments:

malcolm coles says:

You can also use the rel=canonical tag (which I explain partly here: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/use-rel-canonical-fix-duplicate-comment-problems-comment-pagination-in-wordpress/) Google it for more ...

18 March 2009 4:04pm

Nathan New says:

Does Google really see that as 4 different home pages?

What can we do about this?

17 March 2009 10:06am