3 replies to this topic

[Jill]

As part of my SEO for 2013 and beyond series, I promised to provide more in-depth information about the 'SEO killers' I mentioned last time. Today I'm delving into duplicate content as it relates to SEO.

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[Mikl]

Jill,

 

Thanks for this article. One particular point caught my attention.

 

You suggested looking under "HTML Improvements" in Google Webmaster Tools. On your advice, I did so. I noticed that two pairs of pages were showing with duplicate meta descriptions, which surprised me, because I've always carefully hand-written every description myself. On a closer look, I saw that the two offending pages were test pages. I had uploaded these over a year ago, to test various colours and styles, and forgotten about them.

 

The interesting thing is that I never created any links to these test pages anywhere, nor did I give the URLs to anyone. And yet, they are showing up in Google's index. When I searched for a snippet of text, both the "real" page and the test version showed up.

 

I've now deleted the test pages. I don't suppose their presence harmed the site's rankings at all, but I didn't like the idea of a visitor stumbling across them, and anyway I like to keep things tidy.

 

So, thanks for drawing my attention to the "HTML Improvements" tool. It's one of the many features of GWM that I never got round to exporing.

 

Mike

[OldWelshGuy]

Something I picked up a long time ago was that google somehow managed to pick up pages on a server. The only thing I could find was the possibility that Google was in fact crawling server logs to find urls, as part of their URL discovery method.

[jayorban]

There is an easy fix for this write 100% unique content yourself before you post it to your blog, or website problem solved.

 

There a lot of duplicate content checker tools that are out there for free that people can use to check for it also.

 

Good article I always check for dulicate content if I am publishing a guest blog post ( I dont trust everybody:) ) If i write the content myself which I usually do 9 times out of ten then I do not worry about it.

 

But a lot of people new to seo do not know about the repurcussions of duplicate content when it comes to seo so your blog post comes in very handy.

 

Nice write up.