Duplicate Content

Just sharing something I have learnt lateley about Canonical Issues and Duplicate Content.

As mentioned in my two previous posts: Google Penalty and Google Penalty Update my site has been penalized by Google.

So I have been doing research on why this has happened. One of the possible reasons is what Google calls Duplicate Content.

Duplicate Content takes many forms, I will discuss one of them here for the moment. Have you ever come across the term “Canonical Issue”?

Basically what this means is that it is sometimes possible to reach a website with the address www.example.com (note the “www” at the beggining) and to reach the same address without the “www” at the beginning (ie. example.com).

We may see this as the same web page with the same content, however, Google sees it a two separate web pages with the same content.  That is, Google will see this as “duplicate content”.

Now one of the big issues that Google Panda (the latest search algorithm update) has, or will penalize you for is “duplicate content”.

I never knew this before, but it is apparently critical and should be one of the first things every Worpress Blog Owner, should fix immediately!

Here is one of the ways to fix it:

1. You need to get into the “file directory” of your website, through for example Cpanel.
2. Make sure your Cpanel allows you to see hidden files.
3. Find your .htaccess file. You will now need to edit this. Cpanel has an edit funtion.
4. Insert this code into your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

5. Replace the address above “example” with the name of your site.
6. Save the .htaccess file

Done!

What this piece of code does, is tell the “search engine robot”, that all versions of you “non-www” website have now been permanently redirected to you “www” version of the website. Basically that the “non-www” version does not exist anymore. So, Google will not index the “non-www” version anymore. Duplicate Content, or this version of Duplicate Content gone.

There are other Duplicate Content issues apart from this, but these will be dealt with in another post.