How to deal with Duplicate Content issues
Multiple URLs returning the same content, for instance www. and without www. versions of a website, or a printer friendly version of a page, can hurt a website’s rankings simply by providing alternative landing pages to incoming links, thus diluting link popularity between duplicate pages.
Content copied from other websites can actually lead to search engine penalties, but when duplicate pages that don’t seem to fulfill the purpose to manipulate search engine results are crawled, they get grouped in a cluster by Google and one of them will be shown in the search engine result page: This page could not be the best for the webmaster, because it could have a long URL with confusing parameters that lower click through rates (i.e., tracking or session IDs), or have a less attractive design. The good news is that Google consolidates “properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.”
Assuming that it’s not a case of content scraping, a webmaster has different tools that will help in reunifying duplicate content.
Consistent internal linking
Linking to http://example.com/page1.html in one page and linking to http://www.example.com/page1.html in another one make the search engines consider the two links as links to separate duplicate pages.
Other websites can also link to your website using different URLs for the same page. In this case a 301 redirect can solve the problem.
301 redirects and canonicalization
301 redirects are permanent and are the best solution when moving a website to a new domain or modifying the URL structure. When implementing 301 redirects isn’t possible, the rel=”canonical” tag can help signaling the search engines which version of each URL is the preferred one.
Canonical URLs should be used in XML Sitemaps and to link consistently within the site.
URL parameter handling in Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools has a new URL parameter handling feature that lets webmasters suggest irrelevant query parameters that should be ignored by crawlers.
Nofollow links
Using the rel=”nofollow” attribute in links can be a quick solution to prevent search engines from indexing duplicate content pages optimized for printing: In this case the bot wouldn’t find the printer friendly page by crawling the site or on other sites, because normally the printer version page wouldn’t be preferred as a landing page by other websites.
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