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You may have sen on some websites a link to “Print this page” printable version of the site. As it is a great feature letting people easily print the current version of a site it may create a serious SEO problem.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is a situation where two separate URl’s hold the same copy of a site. And that may happen when you have a printable version of your site. In that case you have the main page and its printable version, which is exactly (or almost exactly) the same as the main page it refers to.

There are many scripts and tutorials on how to create a CSS style sheet that will convert the main web page to a printer friendly version. And that is good. It creates a better, easier to read print version of a page for the user.

But without further steps it creates the same copy of page and that is a bad thing.

Eliminate the duplicate content

Search engines treat duplicate content as an attempt of spam and may delete such website from its indexes. Therefore it is important to make sure you do not have a duplicate content issue within your website.

Lets take www.bbc.co.ukas an example.

BBC is using a special script that converts the main web page to a user friendly printable version of the page. So lets go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7602155.stm page to see how the normal version of the page looks like.

Click on picture to enlarge.

Now click on Printable version on top of the story to see the printable version of the page.

Click on image to enlarge.

Looks different, right. There is no navigation, which is unimportant in print version, no unnecessary images, adverts, footers etc. In general you are presented with plain text, the easiest way to read it.

Now, that would still be a duplicate content warning if BBC didn’t excluded the printable version of the site from indexing by search engines. By adding

Disallow: /print/

in their Robots.txt file, BBC excluded the whole printable version of a site from indexing. And that is the whole point of resolving duplicate content issue.

Conclusion

To create both great user experience by adding a printable version of a site and preventing from duplicate content issue in search engines BBC makes their website more user-friendly, accessible and functional.

If you are using the “printable version” feature on your website you should do the same. Exclude it from being indexed to prevent duplicate content issues which may cause lower rankings in search engines.