Some Common Causes of Duplicate Content
When dealing with the search engine optimisation of a website the issue of duplicate content is something any website owner needs to be aware of, including the causes and correct solutions in dealing with any problems that may arise.
What is duplicate content and why should you be bothered?
Simply put, duplicate content is when two or more web pages or even separate websites contain the same or similar content. But why is this a problem? A search engines aim is to ultimately return the most suitable and relevant results for any given search. For this reason, search engines, particularly Google, apply duplicate content filters to a website should they detect that there’s a possible duplicate content issue on a site. They then give the pages a lower ranking in their search engine results by placing them in a supplemental index.
What are the main causes of duplicate content on a website?
There can be many different causes of duplicate content issues on a website. Here are just a few of them:
- URL query strings The use of query strings in a url is probably one of the most common causes of duplicate content on a website. Query strings are used to pass a set of parameters from one web page to another and are generally used on dynamic, database driven websites. It’s quite easy for the same page to be accessible from several different parameter strings, particularly when session ID’s are being used, so consequently, in the eyes of the search engines, duplicate content is present.
- Multiple Domain names
Many website owners register multiple domain names. For example my main website is www.creativecaravan.co.uk, but I could also register the .com, .org or .eu versions as well. The surrounding domain names would then alias to the main domain, in this case www.creativecaravan.co.uk. If the search engines pick up on and index the surrounding domains they will interpret these as carbon copies of the main website and penalise me accordingly.
- Scraper Websites
Scraper websites are sites that basically copy the content from other websites for their own use.
- Distributed articles
This type of duplicate content occurs if you write and publish articles on your website and then submit them to websites specialising in press release or article publication. If the article is picked up it will then be classed a duplicate content.
The above are just some of the causes of duplicate content to be considered on a website and for each one there can be several possible solutions to help fix and combat duplicate content penalties. In subsequent posts I’ll attempt to cover some of the solutions to the above problems but for now I would advise anyone dealing with the search engine optimisation of a website to be aware of query strings in urls, be sure to make good use on the nofollow/noindex meta tag and use a robots.txt file to restrict access by the search engines to any area of your website that may create duplicate content issues such as archive sections or feeds.
