The title of this blog post is so important I’m going to say it again, Duplicate Content is Killing Your SEO! There are several ways that you can kill your SEO efforts with duplicate content. The first one that we are going to discuss is diminishing the SEO value that you bring to one certain page. If you have two version of a single page, and there is not a canonical tag or a 301 re-direct in place, then you are splitting the value of your SEO between those two, or even 3,4,5 pages. You are spending time, effort and money on link building to these pages and the link juice is just being spread too thin. Therefore, killing your SEO.
The next reason why you are killing your SEO efforts is that you are confusing the search engines. How can you confuse a search engine? Aren’t they just supposed to confuse you? Well, when you put multiple pages with the same content, how are they supposed to know which page is the main content page and which is the one that they are supposed to index and put in the search results? Once again, you can solve this with a canonical tag or a 301 re-direct. Keep in mind the difference between a 301 re-direct and a 302 re-direct.
These are two of the main reasons why the duplicate content is going to be killing your SEO. There’s a simple and easy way to stop this from the beginning. Plan out your site architecture thoroughly. If you have an e-commerce site with the same product across multiple categories than be sure to have the canonical tag implemented on all the other products pointing to the strongest URL that you choose.
More on canonical URL’s to come.