Duplicate Content in SEO: Detection and Prevention Techniques - Detecting Duplicate Content

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There are basically two useful approaches to this. The first involves using the Copyscape service, and the other employs Google.

Using Copyscape

To check for duplicate content of your website on other domains, go to Copyscape (linked above), enter your home page URL, and hit the “Go” button.

If you see the message “No results were found for this page. Click below to try some other pages on your site:” then Copyscape did not find duplicate content for that page. However, you may try entering other important URLs from your website (on a sampling basis only) to see if other sites have duplicated your content.

If Copyscape provides some potential duplicates, you need to reconfirm those, starting with the first result, using this tool:

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

The purpose is to determine if their content is substantially duplicated. Sometimes Copyscape will only report % similarities of less than 50%, which is not substantial.

Using Google

You can also use Google to search for sites that duplicate content from your website. Simply use double quote " " from the content snippet example given earlier:

“we offer free codes with detailed explanation of how it works so that it can help you a lot in”

Then hit the Search button. If you can see results that are not part of your domain, then another site has duplicated your content. The expected result is your own domain URL, for example:

Preventing Duplicate Content

You can use any of the following prevention techniques depending on your website's capability, platform and access:

1. Robots.txt = http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Blocking-Complicated-URLs-with-Robotstxt/

2. .htaccess and php related 301 redirections = http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

3. Link rel canonical tag = http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

4. Meta noindex nofollow tag = http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

If you need to prevent a page from being indexed, while allowing Googlebot to crawl the page's hyperlinks, you need to use meta noindex only:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

5. Parameter handling in Google webmaster tools = http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-parameter-handling-tool-helps-with.html

6. For duplicates external to your domain, you need to contact the webmaster for removal of duplicate content pages in his/her domain.

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