Eradicating duplicate content on a website is one of the problematic areas of SEO, and dealing with this in a manner that is ideal only comes from experience and understanding. Creative Website Designs can assist you in removing any duplicate content issues that you may have. Give us a call!
Below are some tips on dealing with duplicate content issues.
Blocking by using robots.txt
A robots.txt file informs search engines what sections they can and cannot crawl on a website. Blocking pages by this means is not the ideal option, but pages can be blocked, which in turn will affect inbound links and page rankings. The primary purpose of using a robots.txt file is to block search engines from reading a website directory structure and any administrative scripts that are operational.
noindex/follow tag
The noindex/follow tag informs Google whether or not to index a certain page(s). This is debatable whether to use this as it can cause more harm than good with regard to SEO.
301 redirects
If one is changing the URL of a page, then using a 301 redirect is ideal and informs Google that a page has been changed. The benefit of this is all link juice and inbound links pointing to the old page are passed over to the new page.
Rel=canonical
Rel=canonical tag is used when there are similar or identical pages used on a website. For instance, a website’s homepage. Google considers index.htm and home.htm suffixes as separate identities and this causes duplicate content issues.