10Dec2008
Filed under: SEO
Author: Pawel Szulencki

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Welcome back! Thanks for sticking by.
To make sure that your website will not be penalized or duplicate content issues you can do the following things:
- Block search engine robots from accessing approtiate parts of your website. If you have printer friendly feature on your website you may consider blocking the access to those pages to limit the possibility of duplicate content issues. Use robots.txt file or meta “no index, no follow” tags to block access to those pages to search engines.
- Use 301 permanent redirects - when you move content from one page to another always use permanent redirect instead of 301 temporary moved redirect. That will guide search engines to the right content and will make sure that your website is always present in search results under the up to date URl addresses.
- Be consistent - keep internal linking consistent. For example always link to /page/ rather than /page and /page/ and /page/index.html That way you will keep the PageRank on one page and help search engines determine and list only one web page instead of three with the same content. That applies to internal and external linking. All ingoing links (if possible) should link to the same pages, not different URl addresses of the same content.
- Optimize CMS system - many Content Management Systems (CMS) are not well optimized for search engine purposes.
- Use preferred version of domain name - for instance use www.domainname.tld or domainname.tld 301 redirect one version of your website to another (with or without “www”). That will guarantee that your website is crawled and indexes once, not twice just under different URL. Use .htaccess file to set up your preferred domain.
- HTTP vs HTTPS - make sure to redirect approtiate pages to only one protocol version (http or https) of your site. Dont let users access the same information through http and https protocols as those are different URl addresses with the same content - duplicates. Allow only one version of each page with only one protocol. 301 redirect all necessary pages to only one version.
Using the above tips will help your site rank well in search engines and will make sure that duplicate content issues do not meet your website.
Sphere: Related Content
Australian of the year (1 comments.)
December 10th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
What about if your data hosting is on a free host (eg mysite.fakefreehost.com or an IP), but you get links to a url that is your own seperate registered domain that “points”/gets hosted on the other free host. Is there a way you can tell google to not cache the free host url (that you dont own), to avoid the double caching?
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
December 10th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
@Australian of the year: As i understand you have a domain that is hosted on a free server, you host files on another free server and you have links pointing to those files.
As long as you do not host duplicated files and point to them (eg. you have two identical files on separate servers and you point to those files using different URL’s unique for each server), you do not need to worry about Google or other search engines. You may host files wherever and as long as there is only one document/file with the same content and only one URl pointing to it, the situation is clear - there is no duplicate content issue.
Nevertheless search engines look for “free hosted” websites with a worse attitude that those hosted on paid servers. It is advised to have a better (not necessarily so expensive) hosting to host your website.
I hope i got your question correctly. If not, let me know what the problem is and ill be happy to help.
Shirley (3 comments.)
January 4th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Very good tips. Additionally, with blogs, there are so many ways to get duplicate content. So it is important to install SEO plugins which prevent the indexing of the home page or archive pages.
And with WordPress 2.7, there are now paged comments which means duplicate content on permalink pages. So be sure to set those additional pages as nofollow or noindex as well.
Shirleys last blog post..Add PHP Code To Your phpBB Forum Templates
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
January 5th, 2009 at 7:38 am
@Shirley: Yes, it is very important for blog websites and thanks for the additional tips concerning WordPress 2.7 application.
Make Money Using Google adsense (1 comments.)
February 3rd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Thanks, Great post good information for all newbies like me.
shravan Mishra(new comment)
June 17th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Very informative post on Duplicate content policy and steps to prevent. Keep it up. I’ll be visiting your blog to see more posts like this.
shravan Mishra´s last blog ..Add Meta Tags To Blogger Blog
Jeremy | Boston SEO(new comment)
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
The most reliable technique I know for avoiding the duplicate content filter is to write worthwhile, original content. Have to say it works a treat
Jeremy | Boston SEO´s last blog ..1000 Backlinks in Just 4 Months - A Newbie’s link Building Experience 