The Manchester SEO Blog takes a look one of the more common problems that often befalls the less Web savvy, duplicate content.  Even those with more SEO experienced often developer a number of misconceptions. Google aims to maintain an exciting variety of results for a particular key phrase, so the more dissimilar your page is to the next most similar one, the more reason Google has to rank your website higher! Equally, the quickest way to get your website taken out of the search results altogether is to simply copy pages from another website.

Sometimes Duplicated Text Content is Unavoidable.

Greg Grothaus

Engineer, Google Search Quality

Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Obvious, no? Heh, well … no actually. Have you ever replied to someone in a forum, and quoted their original post? Have you copied the manufacturers specifications for a product that you supply? If Newtons laws of motion are altered by even a single word, then the definitions would be wrong.

So how do we know when copying is okay? How do you we know it is SEO compliant?  Well, the first questions is about purpose. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and if a wide number of people use similar words to describe your website (and include a link) Google will come to associate those words with your site. However, if these descriptions supplied with the link to your site are identical word-for-word, Google will suspect something is not quite right. The most likely cause of this, is the same person copying and pasting the same description on several sites in order to obtain more back-links for their own site.

The same is true of your pages – you can rewrite a known article in your own words, and expect it to rank without any problems.  You can even include small blocks of identically duplicated text content and expect this to not affect your search position, provided at least the same amount of text again comes from yourself. It’s all about what you bring to the Web:

Ask not what the Internet can do for you, but what together we can contribute to the content of the Web.

If you need to include the manufacturers technical specifications for a product, could you also provide room for some customer reviews or feedback about the product? Perhaps the page could feature threads of chatter and advice about using the device?  Whatever the reason you have for including the duplicate text, think what you can give your visitors to supplement it.

Perhaps your company has several domains. All you need to do in order to get multiple, independent listings is find a reason to alter the text. Aside from issues such as hidden text, search engines aren’t too concerned if your sites look alike. If you just want the one domain, then you could set up a 301 redirection on all your domains onto your main one.

As always, the goal is thinking about your target audience, working out what they want and deciding what unique content you can bring to their Internet experience.

So, you have a successful online business and decide to have a fantastic new website built in order to show the world how serious you are.  How will Google and the search engines be able to find your new pages? How will returning customers – who may have bookmarked pages from your site, still land on the right page? What about all those links from other sites to your pages?

Luckily, help is at hand!  In this second post of Just Roger IT! The Manchester SEO blog, I will discuss tactics to ensure your website structure allows traffic to flow like water through a Japanese Zen garden water feature!

Sitemaps and Search Engines

XML Sitemaps and robots.txt are key.  Believe it or not, Google will periodically try to index various pages from your site independently (not all at once) and it will know something has changed if it reaches for an inner page which is no longer there.  If it fails more than twice it usually tries to reach for /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt in your root folder. A vital part of SEO is ensuring these are in place will cause Google to crawl all of your site at the nearest opportunity, otherwise it could be weeks, perhaps a month or two until it has indexed all your pages.

Redirecting from Old Pages

The most poweful bit of magic, is making sure that your server tells all visitors where their favourite pages have moved to.  There are several search engine and SEO friendly ways to do this, depending on how your site is hosted.  If you have PHP enabled, and your files were previously .php files, you can use the follow method for redirecting an individual page:

<?php
header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.new-address.com/pagename" );
?>


But what if I have a lot of files, perhaps not all PHP? A trick I find really useful, is to use an .htaccess file (this can be placed in the root directory of your site, or added to your existing one). You can use the following structure to tell your server to redirect old requests to new ones:
redirect 301 /doors.html http://www.example.co.uk/showCat.php?id=22
redirect 301 /windows.html http://www.example.co.uk/showCat.php?id=31
redirect 301 /conservatories.html http://www.example.co.uk/showCat.php?id=30
redirect 301 /aboutus.html http://www.example.co.uk/about.php
Generally, it is a good idea to make a note of what pages you had, and ensure you have a contingency plan to ensure you do not end up with missing files as the dreaded 404!

Redirecting to a New Domain

It might be you have moved domains, perhaps you previously owned somedomain.co.uk and have bought somedomain.com which has the same structure and wish to redirect all requests this way (but keep the rest of the URL the same), you could use a general rewrite rule with a 301 redirect such as: Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.somedomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

As always with SEO, it is all about your visitors. Especially those who are returning, you want to keep all those valid backlinks and bookmarks! Be aware of your website structure!