Handling Duplicate Content - Dynamic Pages
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Another big duplicate content issue is the huge number of content variations based on user preference. For example, some users may filter content by topic, color, date, reviews, price, etc. Essentially the content stays the same while display results get shuffled, producing an infinite number of variations that look identical to search engine spiders.
The solution is to block variations from search engine spiders and only show them one version of content. For example, if your site features products, you can allow search spiders to see a default layout of content (which may be by alphabet, price, etc), but block them from following links that filter results by other criteria. This way there's no duplicates, while users can still sort the information.
This also applies to blogs. Try putting content only in one section of the website, instead of multiple sections, and block search engine spiders from accessing archives by date.
Session IDs
Session IDs are evil.
Session ID websites give spiders a unique ID. As spiders follow URLs they all think they're following their own URLs, while in fact they're seeing exactly the same content. Search engine spiders usually ignore session IDs due to the duplication it produces and because there are no static URLs to feature in search results.
Changing or disabling session IDs is the solution.
Quotes, Similar Pages
Quotes or several copied paragraphs are okay. Internal pages with unique content, but several duplicate paragraphs are okay as well.
Google is much more forgiving of duplicate content issues to authoritative domains. In fact, old sites can get away with much more of this than new ones.
Summary
Duplicate content hurts an entire site's performance in the search results. Though only a single page may be filtered out from the results, the site's overall trust score may go down with it.
Duplicate content issues are especially important if you're a merchant, selling items that are similar to those sold by other merchants. Keep the template to content ratio at least on the same level, get rid of session IDs and block access to sorting features to feed search engines spiders better. The better you feed the spiders, the more they like you.
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