This week’s lessons have been about duplicate content.

Today’s Lesson

Having studied Google’s Webmaster Help Center, Google suggest numerous ways in which we can decrease duplicate content in our blog pages.

Included in their list are:

Robots.txt files
301 Redirects
Linking consistency
Use of top level domains
Careful syndication
Use of Google’s Webmaster tools
Avoiding boilerplate repetition
Minimizing similar content

And most importantly, understanding your blogging system/platform. This would include taking time to study your site, and determining where duplicate content appears.

To quote Google,

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

I would like to believe that Google would not penalize a blogger, if they are using a popular blogging platform, such as WordPress.

However, WordPress can generate a lot of duplicate content with it’s categories and plugins for recently written, most commented on, and popular posts. Add archives and articles to the list, and one post could be duplicated up to 10 times, especially if you include one post in several categories.

Today’s Assignment

Study your site.

Are you finding duplicate content?

Sign into your Google account, and read the information in the Webmaster Help Center.

What steps can you take in order to avoid having duplicate content indexed, and possibly being penalized by Google, or other search engines?

Do you care if your site includes duplicate content?