Technical Tips To Avoid A Duplicate Content Penalty

Avoiding duplicate content penalties is important for maintaining a healthy online presence and SEO performance. Search engines like Google aim to provide users with diverse and relevant search results, so duplicate content can negatively impact your rankings. Here are some technical tips to help you avoid duplicate content penalties that we hope will help with performance.

Proper Canonicalisation

Implement canonical tags (rel=”canonical”) on pages with similar content to indicate the preferred version. This tells search engines which version should be considered the original and authoritative source.

Below are some examples of when you may want to canonicalise a page;

• When a page (through site structure) can be reached from more than one location e.g. www.mysite.com/folder1/interesting-topic and www.mysite.com/folder3/interesting-topic
• Pages that use Session Ids like shopping carts or booking pages
• Pages that are the same after login but are secured (http before login and https after)
• Pages that are reached from an Affiliate link
• Pages where the URL changes depending on a change to a field e.g. a travel site with a built in calendar option

In the above you would add a link on the original pages that says to search engines that the content on these pages is known as being duplicate and the original source can be found at the resource linked by canonicalisation.

Use 301 Redirects

If you have multiple URLs with identical or similar content, use 301...