Duplicate Content has long been an issue with webmasters and is cause for concern because duplicating content dilutes your ranking in search results. Perhaps the most common cause of having duplicate content is in allowing both www. and non www versions of your site to exist. However, another place where I see duplicate content occur is when a customer has multiple domain names pointing to the same content. When you use multiple domain names, and there are good reasons to do this, you should pick a preferred URL and ensure that any secondary domains are 301 redirected to that URL.
In this video, Google’s Greg Grothaus does a great job explaining duplicate content problems and solutions ranging from 301 redirects to canonical tags.
I have previously blogged about how 301 redirects can prevent common problems from diluting the search engine ranking for your site. However, there are however a number of situations that create duplicate content concerns that are more difficult address. Webmasters now have additional tools to deal with duplicate content through Google’s Webmaster Tools panel. Through this addition to webmaster tools, Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore. This will a great help, especially for many large dynamic sites.
I have written before about never deleting or renaming a page, but there are times when it is unavoidable. Restructuring a site, removing obsolete products and changing scripting languages (moving to shtml from php, or php from html) make this a common problem.
I am in the middle of two large projects that will involve changing the names of many pages. These are both Joomla-based sites, so I am mitigating some of the problems by using sh404sef. It does a great job of helping you control page names, maintain legacy extensions, etc. But there are still pathing and page name changes that will need to be addressed, for these mod-rewrite is the tool.
Stephan Spencer has recently posted an excellent two-part article on the subject, see:
Whether launching a new website or changing an existing one it is important to do a little upfront work. I have had a couple of clients come to me recently either wanting to toss out their old site and start over or who have sadly, already made wholesale changes to page names or content only to find that their website can no longer be found in search results.
Things to consider when launching a new Website or changing an existing one:
Never rename or delete a page (well almost). If you are contemplating a site change, be mindful of your page names and extensions. If you make changes with abandon, you will loose any ranking associated with those pages and your site. This can be specially tricky if you are moving to a content management system or changing platforms. 301 redirects are critical to this process,
see: Never delete or rename a page.
Before you make changes, you need to be sure you don’t derail existing traffic. It’s important to know what pages are receiving traffic on your site. You want to know what terms or phrases are attracting attention. You want to know what external sites are linking to and insure there is equivalent content going forward. Review analytics data and web logs before you make changes. If you don’t have tracking in place, don’t wait to add it. I recommend installing Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools at the very least to see where you stand. You can’t tell if you have made improvements or where you may have gone wrong, unless you have some history!
See: Getting Started with Web Analytics Tools
I mention in my earlier post that you should choose to use www or not , but regardless, stick with it. Another issue that arises is that you can’t always control how someone else will link to your site. While most will include www. others wil not. To insure that all you links are cataloged in the search engines uniformly, you should implement a couple of rules in your .htaccess file.
A rule to insure www is (or is not) always used. To Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
To Redirect www.mysite.com to mysite.com Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
A rule to always redirect your home page (index.html, index.php, default.htm, etc) to just root (http://www.yourwebsite.com/) REDIRECT 301 "index.htm" http://www.somewebsite.com
While it won’t apply to most of the people reading this blog, it is also important not to have multiple views of the same information. So if you have a site with a page of toasters and you give the browser the option to sort by price, color, etc, be sure that the spiders only see one sort of the information.
Well, almost never… I talk about the importance of page names on my SEO page. The trick is to design your site so that you have the best page names with the right content in those pages for top organic results. But what happens if you inherit a poorly designed site, the content becomes obsolete, or a generic term like “MP3 player” is suddenly secondary to a more popular phrase like “iPod”?
In those cases, you should rename the page and use a 301 redirect (moved) or 410 (deleted) to ensure any traffic to the old page finds the new page. This is critical, unless the page has no traffic and no incoming links, you should never just delete or rename a page and move on.
