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Easiest Way To Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

by Confined To Life
5 replies
G'day Warriors,

I was just browsing through the blog of a very reputable member here and couldn't help but notice they were at risk of incurring a duplicate content penalty from the search engines (if they hadn't already).

It's all about excerpts. By default, almost all WordPress themes set you up to fail here. When you make a new post, the whole post will be shown on the homepage of your blog. But when you click on the title of the post, you'll be taken off the homepage and onto that post's specific page. That's the problem.

You cannot have the same content on multiple pages within your site! If you're displaying the full blog post on your blog index and then the full blog post on the actual blog post's page, you've got yourself a nice case of duplicate content syndrome.

Don't worry, easy fix. It's called using an excerpt. What you want to do is display only a preview of the full post on your blog index. You can do this by using the 'More Tag' as shown below.



By doing that, you only have the full post on the actual blog post's page, not on the blog index as well.

Yeah, it's pretty basic knowledge, but I was surprised to see that some people weren't aware of this.
#avoid #content #duplicate #easiest #penalties
  • Profile picture of the author Tina Golden
    I've heard some say that this can be a problem but I've seen a lot of blogs at the top of the SERPs without doing this. Surely the Google algorithm takes into account how blogs work?
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Originally Posted by Tina Golden View Post

      I've heard some say that this can be a problem but I've seen a lot of blogs at the top of the SERPs without doing this. Surely the Google algorithm takes into account how blogs work?
      They do indeed...

      When the whole 'duplicate content' thing started, having too much code on your pages that repeated from page to page (header, footer, navigation, sidebars, even javascripts and style statements) could get you hit for duplicate content.

      This was a big problem for ecommerce sites where the real content was a photo or two and a few lines of copy, which was overshadowed by the infrastructure.

      The same with blog platforms. The algorithm takes into account that blogs identify the same page with multiple urls. So the only 'penalty' is that the algorithm chooses which page to display - which may or may not be the one you want to display.

      As far as having full posts on the homepage, look at the ecommerce example again. By default, Wordpress will display ten posts on the home page. If all posts are roughly the same length, each post is only ~10% of the content on the home page. While the same post is probably 50-95% of the content on the post page. The possibility of being penalized is pretty slim.
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      • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
        Banned
        Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe View Post

        the only 'penalty' is that the algorithm chooses which page to display - which may or may not be the one you want to display.
        This.

        If you don't tell them which one to put in the main index, they'll choose for you.

        The following is from Google's WebMaster Central Blog ...
        • Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don't want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
        • Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
        • Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.
        Originally Posted by dvduval View Post

        I think duplicate content is especially a problem when your site has content that is found on other sites, especially in large quantity.
        That really isn't "duplicate content" at all. It's syndicated content.

        Content "duplicated" across different domains is not "duplicate content". The distinction is important.

        Google goes to great lengths to distinguish between the two, and to explain the distinction to webmasters.

        It's true that in the long run, if most of your website's content has been previously indexed on other sites, that will be less good for your site's on-page SEO, overall, than if you yourself acquired the initial indexation-rights to at least some of your content. (For myself, all - or virtually all - the content on my sites is initially indexed there before ever being submitted anywhere else at all.)
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  • Profile picture of the author dvduval
    I think duplicate content is especially a problem when your site has content that is found on other sites, especially in large quantity. Google is pretty good at picking the best choice for which page to send visitors and you can always use rel="canonical" to tell google the page you prefer it to use for content (ex. the page where the article is located)
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  • Profile picture of the author dvduval
    Yep, and this is why the canonical tag will tell google what to show first.
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