The Duplicate Content Problem: Bad Solutions And A New Idea.

One thing on a lot of peoples minds lately is the problem of duplicate content. Never mind that Matt Cutts himself has said that this isn’t really a problem for bloggers because Google knows what a blog looks like.

People are concerned about it anyways. And some of the “solutions” put forth are a lot like doctors with leeches. The patient might get better, but it’s going to be in spite of the treatment, not because of it. One thing you don’t want to do is start adding noindex / nofollow meta robot tags to your page headers. I’m sorry, but that’s just silly unless you have a specific reason not to want that page showing up in the SERPs ^[1].

Why Some People Are Making Their Pages Disappear.

The reason Some people are proposing adding noindex / nofollow meta robot instructions is that they feel this will remove pages with largely duplicate content from Google’s supplemental results section. Well, they are right. It will remove those pages from the supplementals. It will remove them from the regular results pages too. They won’t be indexed and they will stand no chance of ever being indexed. That is hardly an ideal solution to the problem of being listed in the supplemental results, especially since the supplemental results have absolutely nothing to do with duplicate content. The way to get out of the supplemental results is to gain some page rank.

Now, even if there is a penalty applied to a blog for having some content duplicated on different pages of the blog, I submit that this is still not a problem. The reason is that one of the pages containing the content will be favored and still show up in the SERPs if it is otherwise worthy of doing so. The others will get buried, but that’s okay because the information is still indexed and still reachable.

When You Might Want To Exclude The Robots

Now we’ve come to one possible example of why you might want to add a noindex meta robot tag to your blog’s headers. If you believe that one of your pages is ranking, but one or several others are not because they are duplicating content, then you might consider noindexing the pages other than the one you want to get the ranking. But this would be a surgical action based on the specific rankings of specific pages that are sharing content. Not a carpet bombing that blasts all of your tag pages into oblivion.

Another valid reason to include noindex meta robot tags would be on purely administrative pages like your contact form, your policy pages, your about page or any other page that really doesn’t add to your sites content in a meaningful way.

What You Should Do About Duplicate Content First.

The first thing to do is to make sure you are displaying only excerpts of your posts, and not the full posts in the category and tag pages. You only want full posts to display on the single post view pages. All other post views should show an excerpt. You can use the WordPress more tag or include an optional excerpt with each post to make this happen.

Personally I do not link to or otherwise acknowledge the existence of date based archives. I don’t believe they have even a crumb of usefulness for readers, and they serve no real purpose from an SEO ^[2] so they essentially don’t exist on my blog. If you like to use them, you might consider adding noindex / nofollow to those pages, but the better solution is to simply not use them. Just redirect any traffic that shows up on a date based page to the search page, or to a tag cloud or category listing page.

A Unique New Approach To The Duplicate Content Problem That Adds Unique Content To Your Blog

I propose a different solution to the duplicate content ‘problem’. Even though I really don’t see it as all that much of a problem, I do see an opportunity in it.

Imagine if every category page and every tag page on your blog had 100% unique content area content. Ignoring the obvious with sidebars, headers and footers ^[3] if we can make all of the content in the content section of the blog completely unique and original from all of the other tag and category pages, that would increase the amount of completely unique content across the blog, and could make each of these pages more focused and hyper relevant to their topic.

So if you included a post in one category and five tags, each of these pages would list that post in a slightly different way and focus on it’s relevance to that particular view. Now not only are each of these views unique, but the meaning and the context of the single post view is semantically enhanced for the search engines ^[4].

An Added Benefit To An Increased Content Tagging System

Not only will this enhance your site’s semantic theming, but it will add new views of each post that may trigger interest in readers who would not have noticed other views. If you tagged a post with say, unique content, duplicate content, categories, tags and meta robot tags, someone searching for information about the duplicate content problem might not have found your post, or might not have realized it’s importance from a general description of the post.

But now with a unique anchor text title and a unique description focusing on the post from the view of “duplicate content” you have laid the ground work for that reader to find your post and quickly recognize it’s relevance to the search they were performing. This should result in both more traffic and more taqrget focused traffic to your blog.

But how would we Add Unique Tag And Category Views For Our Posts?

First off, I’m not going to sandbag you on this. My approach is not as simple as activating some one size fits all SEO plugin. It involves some work on your part. And it’s ongoing work. You won’t be able to push a button or flip a switch and make this happen. It takes work. Work is the price of quality. It’s that simple.

My next post takes you step by step through the process of adding these unique views and this unique content to your blog. If you are willing to try it, you’ll find the rewards are great. If you are looking for the easy way, then this discussion really isn’t going to be your cup of tea.

I’ll have the how to post up for you in a couple hours, and I’ll link to it from right here when it’s posted. I need to grab a couple screen shots and format some code for you first though.
Here’s the How To Use Custom Unique Titles And Descriptions Post.

Popularity: 51% [?]

December 2, 2007 @ 10:40 am
Filed under Optimize
Tagged with: categories • duplicate content • tags • unique content

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Add To Technorati Favorites

It's easy to link to this post! Just copy and paste!
<a href="http://danemorgan.com/duplicate-content-problem-solution-idea/63/" rel="bookmark">The Duplicate Content Problem: Bad Solutions And A New Idea.</a>

Related Posts:

• How To Create Unique Content On Every WordPress Tag And Category Page. (19)
• WordPress Plugin Ultimate tag Warrior Last Version. The End Of An Era. (3)