Hi guys, I am wondering how duplicate content can occur on a website? Does anybody have any examples? Also I would like to find out what is the best way to explain the canonical tag to someone new to SEO. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks Jbone
There are many ways duplicate content can occur on a website. Sometimes it is just how .htaccess redirects are setup. For example, perhaps your website is accessible with or without the www. So http://mywebsite.com/ may have the exact same content as http://www.mywebsite.com/ Or sometimes a url has parameters being passed that affect things such as sorting but still essentially produces the same content. That is accidental duplicate content, but there are also cases where people scrape entire articles or other content. The canonical tag is essentially giving each webpage a unique identifier. If that same content gets loaded from a different url, the canonical tag can signal to the search engine bot that it is actually the same content. It is just a way to deal with duplicate content within a website. I'm sure someone can explain it a little better though.
A common SEO mistake involves having several URLs for your home pages (this phenomenon is also known as "twin home pages").Having the same content at different URLs can cause a lot of problems with your ranking on search engine results pages.
I just read this from the SEOmoz blog about duplicate content a while ago. Thought it might just answer your question. (It cleared up a lot of things for me )
While the canonical meta tag has its benefits, Google prefers the use of 301 redirects because Google's spiders can ignore a canonical meta tag if the spider feels it is more beneficial to ignore the canonical link element.
I can explain it concisely but Google's explanation is elaborative, illustrative and can be easily understood by anyone, so just follow: google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
Duplicate content can be seen if your site opens both with the "www" and "without the www". Google sees thse as two different sites and can think them as two separate sites with the same content. Or if you have the same article over multiple sites is considered duplicate content.
canonical tag is redirecting your url/domain name to only one landing page. because when your homepag do have different urls with the same domain name, it is like duplicate content.
Duplicate content is usually when you have taken an article from an article directory, such as Ezine articles, and placed that article on your site. You can do this if you feel the article will benefit your readers, but be sure and add a paragraph at the beginning of the post that this is a reprint of an article you thought they would like to see. At the end of the article you can post some comments about the article, etc. For the most part you should have original content you have written or a ghostwriter has written for you. PLR can be used as well, but in order for it not to be considered duplicate content it needs to be changed and added too as well. Spinning by sentence is one way to change it 100%. Just spin the sentence three times each and it will created a new article for you. I normally use the plr for part of my research and then rewrite the article to be original. Many website owners, and unfortunately some writers, seem to copy and paste paragraphs from different parts of the web to create content. This is not the way to do it. You can use those sites for research, but the article needs to be written in your words and your voice. Do these things and you will avoid duplicate content.
Good Link wordpress fanboy. I must say that duplicate content on a website is not only bad for your SERPs but makes your site look noob.