Duplicate Content Issues
Just updating my post about duplicate content issues as its becoming more of an issue in a lot of sites that use some sort of content management script like a blog script of e-commerce script.
If you don’t take measures to prevent duplicate content then you might find your site being penalised for duplicate content issues and you could see your sales full. Pages that are classed as duplicate content tend to be dropped from googles index and that will have a negative impact on your sites reputation with google.
My experience with websites is if you can code it yourself the chances of duplicate content cropping up is very slim. Link building can also cause duplicate content if you use different url formats when producing your links, so for example if I link built to my homepage and used two different urls google will class that as two different pages and penalise you for them, so if I link built to the homepage using directorysubmissions.eu and www.directorysubmissions.eu google will class them as two different pages.
The sites that get hit the most for duplicate content are content management scripts like wordpress or e-commerce stores. Reputable scripts like wordpress get updated by a community of coders to make wordpress 100% seo and google friendly. But if you are already experiencing duplicate content or have an old version of wordpress I will tell you what OI would do.
If I already had duplicate content issues then I would add a disallow command in the robots txt file and I would also use googles webmaster tools section and request to get the url pulled from the index. If you don’t want to remove the url or want to do it a different way then you can use googles canonical link element which they say to use as a last result and is a snippet of code you place at the top of each webpage and specify what url to use depending on how google comes across that page.
Duplicate content issues doesn’t mean the end of the world or the end to your website but it is something you need to get on top of as soon as you spot it. Duplicate content can course some pretty severe effects so do your best to prevent it from happening.