Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Excellent Article On Duplicate Content & SEO

There is an outstanding post by Dr. Pete on SEOmoz named Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World.

The article isn't really Panda specific, but it talks about duplicate content issues in 2011, which is the year of Panda.

Here is the outline, but make sure to check out the article:

I. What Is Duplicate Content?

II. Why Do Duplicates Matter?

    1. The Supplemental Index
    2. The Crawl "Budget"
    3. The Indexation "Cap"
    4. The Penalty Debate
    5. The Panda Update

III. Three Kinds of Duplicates
   
    1. True Duplicates
    2. Near Duplicates
    3. Cross-domain Duplicates

IV. Tools for Fixing Duplicates

    1. 404 (Not Found)
    2. 301 Redirect
    3. Robots.txt
    4. Meta Robots
    5. Rel=Canonical
    6. Google URL Removal
    7. Google Parameter Blocking
    8. Bing URL Removal
    9. Bing Parameter Blocking
    10. Rel=Prev & Rel=Next
    11. Syndication-Source
    12. Internal Linking
    13. Don't Do Anything

V. Examples of Duplicate Content

    1. "www" vs. Non-www
    2. Staging Servers
    3. Trailing Slashes ("/")
    4. Secure (https) Pages
    5. Home-page Duplicates
    6. Session IDs
    7. Affiliate Tracking
    8. Duplicate Paths
    9. Functional Parameters
    10. International Duplicates
    11. Search Sorts
    12. Search Filters
    13. Search Pagination
    14. Product Variations
    15. Geo-keyword Variations
    16. Other "Thin" Content
    17. Syndicated Content
    18. Scraped Content
    19. Cross-ccTLD Duplicates

VI. Which URL Is Canonical?

VII. Tools for Diagnosing Duplicates

    1. Google Webmaster Tools
    2. Google's Site: Command
    3. SEOmoz Campaign Manager
    4. Your Own Brain

Ref: http://www.seroundtable.com/duplicate-content-seo-14353.html