How to manage Duplicate content issues for your website ?

In most of the cases Duplicate content is accidental and it is not malicious. And that is not what Google and other major search engine consider as an offense. It is not the violation of webmaster Guidelines. Then what is this Duplicate content?. There are two kind of duplicate content.

1. Duplicate content from your own site.
2. Duplicate content across the web.

You can easily manage to get pass this duplicate content issues if you understand how Google and other major search engines look at search quality. The entire major search engines aim at the quality results in it search. People can easily judge the quality of any search by the results that are delivered. When we look at the past we can see that search quality has improved way beyond beliefs. Now we have all the required information in our finger tips.

When a search engine crawls any website, it checks for the reference to that content in its index. Each URL is considered as unique and no matter whether it comes from your own website of from other website. They aim at delivering the best suitable page for the user query. Avoiding duplicate content is an initiative that helps search engines to minimize chances of displaying irrelevant search results.

Duplicate content across the web in most case violated the webmaster guidelines and hinders the search quality. Take the case of content from article bank. Around the globe thousands of webmasters have access to these and can have the chance of having this in their website. These kind of content is of o value.. Google and all major search engines will check for original and compelling value.

For Duplicate content across your own website you can use the canonical tag.
If your website have some of the pages say for instance a printer version and a web version. You can add a link tag saying URL to tell Google that you have the parent page at www.yourdomain.com/page which is the original source of the content.

Usage of 301 redirects: Usage of permanent redirects can reduce the duplication issue to a great extent. If you have a new page with the same content, you can add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new version. If that happened within the same domain, you can retain the page rank of the website and it will not affect the search engine ranking position.

Usage of (CCTLD) Country code Top level Domains: If your website serve the same content across different languages in different country, the best bet to to go with is by having a country code top level domain. Say if you have a site serving content in Germany, the best way to help Google understand the uniqueness of the content is by having .de domain or de.yourdoamin.com than yourdomain/de
Syndicate your website content wisely: If you syndicate your website content on other website, you need to make sure that you have a link back to your website which servers the original content. Google and major search engines will always show the most appropriate content for the search based on the behavior and they don’t always promise to show the content version you prefer.

Minimize repetition: 
You can manage repeated content by providing an anchor text link that particular page. Say in the footer of your website you have a huge copyright note or terms of agreement, it goes with the entire page and create a hot spot of duplicate content. It is recommended to make it short and give more description on a separate page.

Avoid Publishing Stubs: No user prefer to see a blank page or a page with no listing of content. Avoid such stubs from your website.

Be a part of Google’s great initiative to server search quality. Avoid duplicate content- It can never help your website nor impress your readers. Who in this world like to read the same old stories?