In recent weeks we’ve seen enquiries for our consultancy service rise dramatically, as many businesses attempt to recover from the effect of Google’s recent updates. Considering the ‘shortcut’ tactics employed by many other SEO providers (don’t expect any examples here, we’re not the name-and-shame type), we weren’t necessarily surprised by the surge in ‘please help’ messages, but I have been slightly surprised by the number of people asking a variation of the following question: “How do we deal with duplicate content?”.

Considering this is a reasonably basic element of technical, on-site SEO, it’s not something we’ve ever given much attention to in our SEO blog posts, but it’s obviously still a problem for many websites. So, to try and help rectify that situation, here’s a quick guide to dealing with duplicate content.

It’s worth noting here that we’re talking about duplicate content on your own site, rather than content that has been copied and pasted from another source, or scraped from your website and placed on another domain.

The Problem With Duplicate Content

If your content exists on more than one URL (for example on both the www. and non www. versions), then you’re forcing search engines to make a choice on which is the original source (or the best source) of that content. Search engines won’t rank more than one version of the same page, and generally it’s far better for you to dictate which version they are indexing, which you can only do by controlling your duplicate content via one of a range of methods.

It can also have a negative effect on your SEO, as search engines won’t know which version of the page should receive the trust and authority gained from inbound link metrics – in some cases they may even split the metrics between the duplicate pages, which is far from ideal. This can be made worse if your website attracts genuine natural links, as you may find people link to a duplicate version of your content, rather than the page you’re trying to rank.

Reasons For Duplicate Content

There are a variety of reasons why duplicate content might exist on a website, from non-standardised URL’s to unique session ID’s. For example, you may have a non-standardised version of your website, resulting in the following:

http://website.com

and

http://www.website.com

Both of these URL’s contain the same text and images, creating an issue with duplicate content. This is the most simple (and common) version of duplicate content we see, but you can also find that session ID’s (generated and assigned to each user when they visit the site) can be included in a URL, giving you numerous different versions of a single page. Other issues include erroneous capitalisation in the URL, printer-friendly versions of a webpage and additional URL parameters (such as click tracking codes and the like).

Dealing With Duplicate Content

So how can you deal with the problem? Luckily, it’s not too difficult to sort this issue out, and there is more than one way of approaching it. All the fixes involve canonicalising the URL’s (if you’re not sure what that term means, there’s a great guide to canonicalisation on the SEOMoz website), which will prevent search engines from indexing the wrong page. Let’s have a look at the best approaches to dealing with duplicate content:

Preferred domain in GWT

The easiest way to deal with non-standardised versions of your homepage (www. vs non www.) is to set a preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. This will tell Google which version of the domain you’d like to be indexed and displayed in SERPS, although it’s worth noting that this won’t affect your rankings in Bing, Yahoo or any other search engines. If you’re looking for solutions for all search engines, then you can use one of the approaches below.

301 redirects

Generally speaking, this is my preferred solution for fixing duplicate content issues, as it’s nice and clean and easy to implement. Simply set up a permanent 301 redirect from the duplicate page(s) to the original, and you’ll not only solve your duplicate content issues but you’ll create a stronger page which will have a positive impact on your rankings and indexation.

noindex

Another option for preventing search engines from indexing the wrong pages is to add the ‘noindex’ meta robots tag, which will prevent search engines from including that page in search results.

rel=”canonical”

This is a very similar option to the 301 redirect, but works in a slightly different way. By adding the rel=”canonical” tag to the HTML head of your duplicate pages, you can tell search engines that the page is a duplicate of another page, and that all content metrics, links and indexation should be given to the specified URL.

For example, if you have http://www.website.com/pagea and http://www.website.com/page-a (both containing the same content), but you only want /pagea to be ranked, you can add the following code to the HTML head of /page-a:

<link href=”http://www.website.com/pagea” rel=”canonical” />

That’s about it for our brief guide to dealing with duplicate content – if you have any questions or there’s anything you don’t understand, just let us know in the comments section and a member of our SEO team will be more than happy to help you out.

If you’re a talented graphic designer, SEO engineer, copywriter or link-building specialists then we want to hear from you – particularly if you’ve got experience in creating awesome infographics or you boast an enviable list of PR contacts.

For those that are interested, you get to work in a small, friendly and busy team of talented individuals, based in our head office in Herefordshire. Here’s a list of the benefits of working for Designbysoap Ltd:

- Competitive salary that will grow as you do
- A range of benefits (soon to include health care)
- Reasonably flexible working hours
- The chance to work with a talented team of designers, writers and SEO engineers, giving you the opportunity to learn a host of new skills
- Your birthday off every year
- Random benefits and incentives just for being good at what you do
- The chance to work with some awesome brands and clients
- My jokes (laughing is compulsory)
- Genuine career progression

Not only that, but if you’re a football fan you’ll be pleased to hear we insist on having any daytime football games on in the office, so you won’t miss a single England game during Euro 2012.

Interested? Get in touch with us on 01432 373 670 or email your CV and an introductory paragraph to john@designbysoap.co.uk. If you’re an infographic designer, check out our infographics to get an idea of the kind of thing you’ll be tasked with creating.

So why is Pinterest so popular? What’s the fuss all about? To answer these questions one of our team produced the following ‘What’s The Big Deal With Pinterest’ infographic on behalf of a client, originally published on the fantastic Speckyboy website:

Let us know what you think of the infographic, and as always please consider sharing via the social media buttons below!

As a result of our rapid growth over the last couple of months we’ve moved from our beautiful country offices out in Canon Pyon to the Rural Enterprise Centre in Hereford, where we’ve got a bit more room to stretch our legs. If you’d like to come by and say hello you’ll find our address in the footer or over on our contact page.

You may also have noticed we’ve given the website a bit of a makeover – let us know what you think of the new design and if there’s anything you’d like to see on the new site, the best suggestion wins a prize!

Now that the move is complete and the website’s more or less finished we’ll be getting back to regular blogging, so be sure to check back regularly for some brand new infographics and the latest SEO news and tips.

We gave the newest addition to our team the responsibility for coming up with the infographic, and I think it’s fair to say we were all incredibly impressed with the results. So here’s our brief insight into the zombie walk (feel free to repost this infographic, just please link back to Designbysoap if you do):

Our zombie infographic was designed by Dan, our newest graphic designer. If you’re looking for bespoke infographic design you can get in touch with us via the contact form, or have a look at our portfolio to see more of our previous designs.

A few weeks ago we designed the ‘What Are Websites Made Of’ infographic for the fantastic Six Revisions website, which saw a huge amount of interest and reposts. After leaving it a few weeks we thought we’d add the infographic to our own blog, for those who haven’t already seen it posted around the net.

If you’re looking for affordable, bespoke infographic design, get in touch with our design team via the contact form.

We’ve done more infographics over the last couple of months than we did in the previous year, so expect to see a lot of new designs hit the blog in the next few weeks. We’re starting with our Broadcast Spectrum infographic, designed by a new addition to the team, Greg Duggan.

Feel free to repost this infographic on your own blog, just please link back to us if you do:

[Click for full version]

We’ll be launching a service page in the next few days which will include pricing, turnaround times and packages. In the meantime, here are a few of our recent QR code client designs – if you’d like to discuss a QR code design, give us a call on 01432 830 750 or drop us an email using the contact form.

Direct Sight

We came up with two QR codes for sunglasses and glasses retailer Direct Sight, both of which link directly to the Direct Sight website. The codes were designed with the brand colours in mind, and are designed to help increase mobile traffic and website sales.

HotelshopUK

HotelshopUK needed a QR code to help publicise their competition; whereby they’re giving away a two night luxury holiday in a four star country resort in the UK. The code links directly to the competition sign-up page, so if you’re interested in winning a free holiday, scan away and get yourself entered!

SEC Estimating

SEC Estimating specialise in estimating software for construction, electricians and plumbers, and wanted a promotional QR code that fits their brand. The code links directly to the SEC Estimating homepage, helping to improve mobile traffic and enquiries.

In a video posted on YouTube, a distorted voice claiming to represent the ‘hacktivists’ warns of the upcoming hack on the hugely popular social networking platform, citing Facebook’s misuse and misappropriation of personal data as the reason for the impending attack.

The video (which is included below), discusses how Facebook appropriates and shares your personal data, making some interesting and pertinent accusations:

Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.

Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your privacy settings, and deleting your account is impossible. Even if you delete your account, all your information stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time.

Facebook are yet to respond to the video, which was posted last month, but has seen a substantial increase in circulation and publicity over the last few days.

So can we expect to see Facebook destroyed on November 5th? Not everyone thinks so. Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder of Kasperksy Lab, has suggested that the video could be a fake. In a Tweet sent out not long after the video began to go viral, he said:

The news around #Anonymous to attack #Facebook on November 5th is most probably fake. Pay attention to the strange Twitter name they used, and links to websites with adverts.

Whether or not this is the case remains to be seen, but given that Anonymous is thought to be a loose collective of like-minded hackers from around the world (rather than a singular entity with a noted leader and direction), it’s more than possible that this is the intention of a small section of ‘Anons’, rather than the whole group.

According to @GroupAnon, a high-profile Twitter account following the activities of the Anonymous hacktivists, this is indeed the case. In a Tweet responding to the questioning of the videos authenticity and accuracy when it came to the intentions of the hacking group, they said:

#OpFacebook is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it.

So are the hacking group targeting the social media giant? Possibly. But if they are they certainly aren’t doing so as a coherent group, with some Anon related Twitter accounts responding directly to recent reports with clear denials:

Even if the video (and the subsequent threat) is legitimate, it remains to be seen whether or not the hacking group would even be able to bring down such a popular and powerful site, particularly in the long-term. The usual method of attack from the group is a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, whereby a network of remotely accessed computers bombards a website with requests, overloading the server and preventing access for regular users. I’m unsure this would even work on Facebook, as the site is used to dealing with a phenomenal amount of requests anyway, and as such possesses huge amounts of server space (not unlike Amazon, who the group tried and failed to attack at the end of 2010). Even if the attack were to prove successful, to have any kind of long-term impact the attack would need to be continued indefinitely, which I simply can’t imagine is a likely eventuality.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

“Why would I want to help someone else’s SEO by linking to them?”

“Why would I link to a potential competitor when I could link to my own internal page?”

“Won’t external links cause me to lose PageRank?”

“Won’t external linking cause me to drop in the SERPS?”

It occurred to me that many people might be struggling with this issue in their own SEO campaigns, so I thought a blog post was in order to help clear up a few of those pesky SEO myths and hopefully help you get your external linking protocols up to where they should be.

Leading by example

As a creative SEO agency, one of our ongoing tasks is to look at which sites consistently rank well for both long-tail and highly competitive short-tail keywords; attempting to find common, recurring elements in each site. Completing exercises such as this not only gives you a good idea of the techniques and approaches used by the most popular sites, but it also helps you put together a list of potentially beneficial ranking elements.
I consider the best sites to be leading by example – even if they’re not trying to, and it’s our job to take notice of (and learn from) these examples.

Looking at some of the biggest and most popular sites online, you can start to get an idea of what it will take to get your own sites ranking strongly, and using positive correlation, you can even start to eliminate some of the more pervasive SEO ‘myths’. One such myth is the belief that external links have a negative effect on rankings, and that using them ‘leaks’ PageRank to external sites.

Just by looking at the external linking policies of some of the biggest and highest rankings sites (take Mashable, SEOMoz, BBC or SearchEngineLand for example) we can see that this simply can’t be the case – all of the above sites tend to link out in the body of articles or other content, and all rank well, which would seem to suggest that external linkings simply don’t negatively affect your rankings. Admittedly, this isn’t the most compelling of arguments to state definitively that external linking doesn’t hurt your rankings, after all it could certainly be possible that external linking was indeed a negative factor, but that the weight of all the other positive factors (high quality content, high quality inbound links, natural link profiles, high levels of engagement and sharing via social media, strong SEO-based markup, etc) are causing the sites to rank regardless of their outbound links. However, a look at SEOMoz’s SEO Ranking Factors 2011, we can see from the correlation data gained from their research that there is a 0.04 correlation between the number of outbound links on a page and strong search engine rankings. This might seem insignificant, but when considered with all the other ranking factors it gives a pertinent indication – that external linking doesn’t negatively affect search engine rankings.

Quality and quantity

Of course the previous statement assumes that you’re linking to relevant, high-quality content from your website, if you’re placing dofollow links to low-quality sites hosting malware and selling counterfeit viagra then you can safely assume it probably will have an negative impact on your rankings, just as it will have an impact on the way people view your brand (and how many people subsequently visit your site).

When we’re looking at the external links from the most popular and best ranking websites, we can immediately see a common theme – they’re all linking to high-quality, relevant and useful content. Generally speaking, this is usually referencing content that expands on an area of discussion, recommending additional content or service providers, or used to provide credit or acknowledgement (usually for data, quotes or images). As a result, the links that come from the biggest pages are useful, and not there simply to push you to a sales page or as an obvious attempt to bolster another pages’ ranking for a specific term (both internally and externally, like the anchor text links you find on sites populated with posts from article marketing and distribution networks).

The other thing you notice is that the quantity of external links is any given piece of content on a high-quality site is never overwhelming – the text isn’t stuffed with outbound links. Rather the links are placed only when they’re useful or necessary from a journalistic standpoint (i.e. crediting your sources). They’re also only placed when they’re relevant, which is another crucial element to successful outbound linking.

What we can draw from this is that external linking should be an element of your on-site content production, but only when it’s relevant and adds value to the user (even a source reference link adds value, as your readers may be interested to check out the source of quotes or data). External linking shouldn’t be adopted because it will help your rankings, it should be adopted because we can be fairly sure it doesn’t hurt your rankings, and because it adds additional value and weight to your content.

Community-led value

A potential benefit of external linking that people often overlook is the community aspect of external linking, and the potential benefits that can bring (such as additional traffic, brand awareness, inbound links and social media links). If you’ve got a website with a decent amount of traffic and high level of readership and engagement, then any outbound links you place in your content will likely send additional traffic to that external source. As a result, you will show up in their analytics as a referring site, and this awareness can be extremely valuable.

If you’ve linked to someone in a positive way (i.e. through an advocation of their talent, review of their service or product, etc), then they may well link back to you, or link to your content via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Not only will this send additional relevant traffic back to your site, but these social media links will help your SEO, not to mention improve your overall brand awareness.

Dofollow or nofollow?

I often come across people adding the nofollow attribute to external links in their content, in what I’m sure is an attempt to maintain fabled ‘link-juice’ on their own pages. For me, if you’re placing an external link to additional content on your site, it should be a dofollow link*. Nofollow links are designed for links to content you don’t trust (or at least haven’t verified), and therefore don’t want to be crawled from your site (making them good for links placed in comments and other user-generated elements), but this simply shouldn’t apply to external links in your content. Why would you be linking to content you haven’t verified or a site you don’t trust? If I’m going to add a link to my content, that link will be relevant, high-quality and will be adding value to our readers, so I’ve got no problem with those links being dofollow.

*The only exception here is with banner advertisements and paid text links, which should always be marked with the nofollow attribute.

Hopefully that will give you more confidence when it comes to linking to external sources; just make sure they’re relevant and that they add something to your content, and you should find they have a far more beneficial impact than a negative one when it comes to traffic, brand awareness and SEO.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)