Keeping Your Content Unique

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, it is important that the textual content on your site is unique. Google can penalise sites for duplicate content, and rightly so.

If you were to perform a search in Google and the top ten results brought up sites with exactly the same information, you would probably think that Google wasn’t doing its job properly and in time would move on to other search engines.

For this reason, I will explain some of the most common internal and external duplication which occurs on sites and how they can be resolved.

Internal Duplication

This often occurs on ecommerce sites where either a product can be reached via several different URLs, or when products are very similar and as a result, have very similar specification details.

Where products can be reached via different URLs it is important to only use one and permanently redirect the others to this one common URL.

Where products contain similar specifications, why not include the specification as an image instead? It can then be used on multiple pages without causing any duplication issues, as Google cannot read the content of the image.

External Duplication

A useful tool for determining whether your site has any external duplication issues is Copyscape, which can be found at www.copyscape.com. By entering your domain name into this tool, it will bring up any web site pages which contain matches for the content on your site. A nice feature of this tool is that it highlights the duplicate content so you can easily determine what, and how much content has been copied.

As a rule of thumb, you only need to worry if more than 30 words are duplicated.

If you are the owner of the content and another site has copied it, the first step to take would be to contact the site owner and ask them to remove the duplicated content. If they refuse, the second step would be to report the site to Google using Google Web Master Tools and explain exactly what has happened and the pages in your site that this affects.

Lastly, if the above does not work, the only way to resolve the issue is to rewrite the content on your site. Although this means extra work on your part, it is a solution which will effectively resolve any duplication issues.

Gemma Neesham
Natural SEO Programmer