Blog SEO - Avoid Duplicate Content

Many site owners make the mistake of duplicating their site’s home page. They will have the same content for http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. This will result in lost link value and therefore damage the rankings of the site’s homepage. For example you may have your internal links pointing to http://www.url.com but outside sites may be linking to http://url.com. Therefore you will be diluting the effectiveness of your site.

If you find many links outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule so all pages will be redirected to the same url.

How to include the 301 re-write rule in your web site

1. Create a .htaccess file. Open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension).

2. Place this code in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

3. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it,
skip a line, then add the above code.

4. Save the .htaccess file

5. Upload the file to the root folder of your server.

6. Test your homepage. Type http://url.com, or /www.url.com into your browser’s address bar. Any of these urls will now automatically be redirected to http://www.url.com

Tip

Whenever exchanging links with other sites or getting incoming links make sure you always use http://www.url.com
This will make sure you preserve the link value of your site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Blogging . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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10 Responses to “Blog SEO - Avoid Duplicate Content”

  1. karlyns.com » links for 2006-07-07 Says:
    July 6th, 2006 at 10:16 pm

    [...] Blog SEO - Avoid Duplicate Content– Web Design Discussion (tags: seo) [...]

  2. MondoBlog » Blog » Fast SEO Links Collection - Num 3 Says:
    October 31st, 2006 at 10:08 am

    [...] Avoid Duplicate Content [...]

  3. SEO - Search Engine Optimization Says:
    March 18th, 2007 at 2:43 am

    I had some thoughts on a similar SEO / Search Engine Optimization related topic, maybe i’ll start a new thread

  4. faux bricks Says:
    April 7th, 2007 at 11:00 am

    Thanks. I used your code to fix my sites.

  5. SEO Help Says:
    April 19th, 2007 at 4:09 am

    Hi,

    I am working as SEO and Web Promotion expert from last 1 n 1/2 years and now start free lancing work also. I contacted many companies and i got some projects also. I recentally come to this blog and found some interesting discussion about duplicate content.

    I also want to share my experience with one my company website. One of our company website was well ranked in Google for all our main keywords. The site was dynamic and we had have more than 100 thousand pages in Google. We did good work and our site ranked in top for many keywords. This site live from last three years and we are still doing well.

    Few days before i found that our listing in SERP decrease day by day and we are now not listed in top 100. I found many duplication in our web pages. I read many articles and blogs to get ideas from other webmasters and i found good help. Finally i come to the point that if you own a big website and have hundreds or thousands of pages than make sure that all pages have sufficiently different to other page of your website.

    Regards,
    BHAVESH.

  6. Get rid of your duplicate content [FitForFreedom] Says:
    May 23rd, 2007 at 2:10 pm

    [...] Read here on drostdesign.com how to implement this to your site. Try it with my domain, just entering fitforfreedom.com into your browser will redirect you to http://www.fitforfreedom.com as a result of the above changes to my .htaccess-File. Additionally, if you are using Google Webmaster Tools then you can tell Google which domain you prefer as your main URL. [...]

  7. FitForFreedom Says:
    May 23rd, 2007 at 2:13 pm

    Get rid of your duplicate content…

    This is the fourth part of the WordPress SEO tutorials series.
    You will learn what duplicate content means, why it can be dangerous for your search engine ranking and how to avoid creating duplicate content.
    There has been a very intensive discussion …

  8. Get rid of your duplicate content » MarcoRichter.net Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 10:04 am

    [...] Read here on drostdesign.com how to implement this to your site. Try it with my domain, just entering marcorichter.net into your browser will redirect you to http://www.marcorichter.net as a result of the above changes to my .htaccess-File. Additionally, if you are using Google Webmaster Tools then you can tell Google which domain you prefer as your main URL. [...]

  9. Duplicate content, how to make your blog a safer place for Search Engine spiders. | Bare Fly.com Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 5:46 am

    [...] Read the post here on Get rid of your duplicate content and on blog seo avoid duplicate content for more information If you like the post please bookmark or share. Thank you These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

  10. James Says:
    March 22nd, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    I wrote another idea here http://www.gettingmorevisitors.com/2008/03/14/simple-ways-to-avoid-duplicate-content-penalties/ about another simple way to avoid those dupe content penalties

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