Expert Tips on Duplicate Content

If you optimize your site with respect to the search engine industry, I'm sure you are aware of the specter of duplicate content. Even accidentally repeated content can cause ranking issues, something we are all trying to avoid.

At the Seattle SMX Conference, our own Mike McDonald caught with Google engineer extraordinaire Matt Cutts to discuss this very issue. Cutts himself acknowledges duplicate content is an interesting dilemma even for Google to tackle, something he indicates while discussing the concept of content reclamation:

"You always have to worry about how it can be spammed. What if someone innocent doesn't claim their content and then and smart spammer comes along and claims everybody else's content... That's a tricky thing.The second session from the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle was focused on the issue of duplicate content.

Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager, Live Search, Microsoft said you should be concerned with duplicate content on your site because it fragments your pages in some way. In order to avoid duplicate content, he said to keep session parameters simple.

For local sites he recommended having unique content on them and if you don't have different content, you most likely don't need multiple pages. To avoid people copying your content, he said to tell people that are going to use your content to attribute..

Peter Linsley, Senior Product Manager for Search,  at Ask.com gave a standard definition of duplicate content saying it was the same content on multiple urls. The reason it is bad for search engines is because users do not want to see the same content result

As for avoiding duplicate content you should use copyright or creative commons notice. Also make the content unique and difficult to be taken out of context.

Amit Kumar, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo Search, said that Yahoo tries to crawl links from duplicate, less; so fewer visits from the crawler could mean that the content may be considered duplicated. He added if you get content from somewhere else you should attribute.

Vanessa Fox, Google, Product Manager weighed in on duplicate content saying they want to show unique information so they want to avoid duplicated information.

If you have pages that are fairly similar, you may want to consider combining the two. In some cases, pages that are similar just need to be distinguished from one another a bit more..

On client site redirects, she said a 301 is considered a client side redirect because the client is actually taken from one page to another and the crawler can see the message.

On search engines reaching out to Word Press and blog software types to avoid duplicate content, she said there is a lot they can do as far as working with the CMS software people to come up with better solutions so end users won't have to worry about duplicate content."