Websites have had to deal with duplicate content for quite some time now; however it is only now that high end search engines such as Google have managed to implement state of the art duplicate content checking tools. Google today is smarter at knowing which websites and pages have duplicate content, flagging them as way of figuring out which pages to display in its SERPS.
There are a couple of ways you can go about blocking duplicate content on your website and while many say you should redirect traffic there are many other easier and straight forward techniques which can be used. However I would like to stress that even though I have mentioned a number of techniques below there certainly isn’t one good way of doing things, the technique you use primarily depends upon what your situation is.
The Robo.txt file
This is one of the most common and oldest ways of blocking a search engine’s access to duplicate content on your website. This is as simple as adding the URL of the pages you don’t want the search engine’s crawler to access and you are done. However the problem with this technique is that it does not stop a search engine from arriving on those pages if someone else is linking to it.
Using Meta Robots
Using ‘noindex/follow: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />’ You can easily eliminate duplicate content while at the same time the ‘follow’ value is still allowing your pages to pass around some of its link juice. However because some experts believe that the ‘noindex’ command also eliminates your links from being juiced you cannot bet if your pages will still hold value.
Redirect ‘301’
The 301 redirect is considered the best fix for duplicate content primarily because it has been tested and proven by so many industry gurus. It has also been abused in many ways but then again which good things haven’t? The elements that sets this method apart from the two mentioned above is that it has also been termed as a good fix by many leading search engines, plus it is easy to implement a 301 redirect on any website / blog.
Conclusion
Since all leading search engines love unique and original content, if you want to rank high in search engine results you need to be able to eliminate duplicate content from your website. The more unique and original your content is the higher you can expect to be ranked.
