Is your blog duplicate content proof?

Duplicate content seems to be carrying much importance these days as it’s the one factor that alone can determine if your blog is a failure or not. There may be different opinions to this, but I have some valid reasons to believe so. Let’s see what they are.

Why should I be bothered about duplicate content? I don’t copy.

If you are on Wordpress, there’s a good chance that there are duplicate contents on your page. This doesn’t mean that you have two posts written exactly the same way in your blog. It only means that, the very single post can appear at two or more places in your blog, so that when Google crawlers visit the pages, it sees the same content at two or more different pages - making it duplicate content. Stupid robot !

It isn’t fair to call this situation as duplicate content honestly. Because you have taken pain in writing quality content and have taken care in posting unique content in each article and just because you are on wordpress, you end up in this mess? Not fair at all.

So the situation is more like you trying to cheat Google with copied content on each page. Okay let’s face it !

Okay, So what do I do?

So the problem lies with your blogging platform - Wordpress. You need to tweak it to set things right. How?

Where does the duplication occur?

According to Utheguru.com ,

    * It will be found in the SEO Tools ‘category’ (and any other categories I have it in)
    * I’ll be able to find it in the monthly archive for June, 2007.
    * I’ll be able to find it on the index page (http://www.utheguru.com) for at least a little while (after which it will gradually sink deeper and deeper into the bowels of the site).
    * I’ll be able to find it in the RSS feed for my site.
    * It will be available in the form of a trackback.
    * Last, but not least, it will be available as an individual post.

How do I avoid duplicate content?

Use Plugins
All in one SEO pack - is the best available plugin that helps you to avoid duplicate content. Make sure that every post of your’s have different META description and META keywords. This will help you avoid each post article of your’s having the same default blog description.

Fixes
According to Sizlopedia.com - adding this code to your .htaccess file will reduce the duplication error of being able to access the same url from different places.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*(/page/[0-9]*/?)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/200[0-9]/?$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/200[0-9]/[01][0-9]/?$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/200[0-9]/[01][0-9]/[0-3][0-9]/?$
RewriteRule (.*)(/[0-9]+/?)$ $1/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

I’ve written a small article on avoiding duplicate content as well , where I’ve discussed about changing your meta tags to curb duplication.

I think a combination of these three methods is a good way to avoid duplication on wordpress, at least the chances are set to minimum.

Also see Google’s official tips on what duplicate content is and how you can curb them here.