Duplicate URL issues in SEO

To make sure there’s no duplicate content of a website is one of the most important things we do in our SEO work. It is well known that Google has penalty on the duplicate content. Search engines dislike duplicate content because they don’t want to show same pages on their search result pages. However, people don’t realize that sometimes they have mistakenly duplicated content by themselves. People could make this mistake mainly in three ways:

♦ Duplicate domain
Lots of people use both .com and .co.uk for their websites without a 301 redirect. It means that you have two identical websites with same content. It’s unlikely they will both rank for the same keywords and you might be penalized by Google for having same content. Therefore, if you’re aiming for the UK market more than the others, you might be better to redirect the .com to co.uk. A unique domain is as important as unique content.

♦ www and non-www
Search engines don’t always recognize that the same page is being presented multiple ways because they index URLs rather than pages. So if your website can be displayed in both http://www.example.com and http://domain.com, you need to redirect the non-www one to www. You can do this with an .htaccess file in Apache server and change configuration through administrative console in IIS server.

♦ Internal links
Try to keep your internal linking consistently. For example, you might use both www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html pointing to your homepage. It’s better for you to use just www.example.com linking to homepage instead of index page when you design your site.

Lili
SEO Programmer