Where Search engine optimisation is concerned, there are not many things that have as serious a negative impact on your websites ability to rank well as duplicate content that is displayed on other domains, and canonical urls which cause your own content to be obtainable on more than one url. As a provider of SEO Services I have quite a bit of experience in identifying and correcting these issues and decided to pass on some of the techniques I have learned over the years. This article will run through the best methods of both determining if you in fact have a duplicate content or canonical url problem, and also how to deal with the issue if you do indeed detect a problem. Google has no desire to rank more than one page containing the same content within its search results, and as such has complexed algorythm’s in place to ensure this does not happen. This usually entails determining the original source of the content (or the website using the content that has the most trust) and delegating additional pages to the supplemental results. If the same content appears on numerous canonical urls within your domain you may also find that google imposes ranking penalties.

One of the easiest ways to establish if you have a basic canonical url problem is to visit your website in your browser and then remove the www. portion of your url, if the site does not redirect you back to the www. version of your page then you have a problem (if your website is set to present the url of each page without the www. at the beginning, then do the reverse to test your site and add the www., the site should redirect to non www.). To correct this problem requires just three lines of code adding to your ht access file if the website is hosted on an apache server, if you are using a Microsoft IIS server, then you will need to make contact with your web host and get them to add the redirect for you via the servers internet service manager.

Duplicate content issues caused by scraping are detected in an altogether different manner, the easiest way is to use a service such as copyscape or plagium to scan each page of your site individually. These plagiarism checkers will return any other pages on the web that match your content, copyscape checks pages in googles index, whilst plagium checks yahoo’s index. The results will show a list of pages (where duplicate content is found) and even highlight the matching text when you visit each result. How you go about correcting this issue really is dependent on how the problem came to be, if you scraped content from another site to use on your own, then you are breeching the content owners copyright, and should remove the content and rewrite your own unique and original content. Conversely, if the content originates on your site, then you should request that the offending site removes your content and if they fail to do so, then file a digital millennium copyright infringement notice with the top three search engines (google, yahoo, and bing). You may even wish to contemplate legal action. If you identify a duplicate content problem on your site that you are unable to address after reading this article then it is probably best to approach an experienced SEO Services provider, this type of problem is very common and most SEO’s have lots of experience in fixing such issues.

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