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Easily Fix A Common Duplicate Content Problem

Last Updated: 13 July 2014 By Mike Haydon

One of the most common SEO misconceptions (still!) is the issue of duplicate content. Now this is usually overhyped and there are a lot of myths surrounding it.

Duplicate Content Penalty

This is one of the most commonly misunderstood parts of SEO.

Commonly bandied around versions are:

  • If you have the same article on your site and somewhere else on the internet your site will be penalised by the search engines. Wrong.
  • If you post the same article across the internet only one will be indexed. Wrong.
  • Sites with a few duplicate content issues will be hit by a massive penalty. Wrong.

As Google themselves said, There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty.

If you want proof that the same article can be posted on your site and hundreds of others and they all be indexed, search Google for “who wrote aesop’s fables” (in quotes). You’ll find an article I wrote back in 2006 and published to my own site and lots of article directories. It’s also been scraped and republished by a bunch of spammers (bound to happen after 6 years). There’s still about 1,000 versions reported in Google’s index.

So don’t worry about whether you posted the same article to two directories!

Reduce Multiple Versions

*If your site runs on WordPress, this post probably won’t apply to you. WordPress handles this automatically.

One problem I often see is that the entire website is duplicated, where the http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com both exist separately and are identical.

With the way the search engines work, only one version will likely show, but it may not be the one you want. Or multiple versions of one page show, but not another.

You can also have some pretty messy and inefficient results when linkbuilidng or organising your site structure.

The easy way to fix it is to add some code to your .htaccess file. If you didn’t already know, your .htaccess file is in your root folder (http://www.domain.com/.htaccess) and you can often get access to it through an FTP program like Filezilla. Edit it with any plain text editor. Notepad is fine. Sometimes a .htaccess file hasn’t been created, so don’t panic – as long as you do your research to make sure your server can use it, understand all the ramifications if you mess up, and can fix said mess up in the event it happens, just go and make one.

If you want to redirect the non-www version to the www version, put this code in:

ReWriteEngine on

ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com

ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com$1 [R=301,L]

If instead you’d prefer to just have the non-www version of your site, the redirect code is:

ReWriteEngine on

ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]

ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [R=301,L]

Be very careful. If you don’t know what you’re doing you could mess things up. Use of the code is at your own risk.

Having said that, I’ve generally found that keeping a pre-edited copy of the .htaccess file on hand and uploading it over the new one is enough if things get out of hand. Let me stress again – you’re on your own if you mess up your site because of using this. I’ve used it before to good effect, but I’m sure there are plenty of variables that I haven’t taken into account. One to particularly check for is any other subdomains.

If in doubt, get a professional to do it for you.

Filed Under: SEO
Originally Posted: 9 January 2012

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