This can be one of the most vexing and troublesome problems any website can face! Over the past fews years, search engines have cracked down on “thin” and duplicate content through penalties and lower rankings.
Search engines are very picky about duplicate versions of a single piece of material. To provide the best researcher experience, they will rarely show multiple pieces of repeat content. Thus, search engines are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original. The end result is ALL of your duplicate content could rank lower than it should.
Canonicalization is a Big Word…What is It?
Canonicalization: when two or more duplicate versions of a webpage appears on different URL’s. This is very common with modern Content Management Systems. For example, you offer a regular version of a page and a “print optimized” version of the same content. Duplicate content can even appear on multiple websites. For search engines, this presents a big problem – when Google, Yahoo! and Bing find duplicate content, which version of this content should they show to searchers? In SEO
circles, this issue is often referred to simply as “duplicate content”.
For example, use the image I’ve posted in this blog article. If you leave multiple versions of content on a website, your might end up with a scenario like the one posted. Which door is the right door? Don’t leave your website’s all-important web exposure to chance. Avoid penalties from search engines by ensuring that they don’t find duplicate content anywhere on your site.
How Do You Avoid the SEO Killer?
1) When generating any new content, check it using a content checker tool like this one (which is popular among teachers, but works just as well for content writing for your business) http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/
2) Require from your SEO firm that they list (in detail) ALL the URL’s associated with your website, at a current standing.
3) Have your SEO firm review and make edits/changes to any URL’s that has canonical versions of content!
