ABC Article Directory Blog

By: Emmanuel DeFreitas

Are you aware that your content may be penalized by Google because of a bad case of mistaken identity? I received an interesting email from Chris Richardson, the Adiministrator at Jayde, the B2B search engine, warning me about potential ranking loss from duplicate content reprimands and to make sure there aren’t four or five different URLs navigating to the same page. I have implemented the advice listed below to avoid any potantial penalty from Google and I suggest that you do likewise.

Google describes duplicate content on their Webmaster Central Blog in this way, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.” Quite a mouthfull!

There may be some variation to the domains associated with your site. If you type in “yoursite.com” and “http://www.yoursite.com” you may get a completely different set of results. I personally noticed this variation when checking the Alexa links to one of my sites. Google will view these two domains below as separate entities and if the content is exact, they can take punitive measures against the offending site.

yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com

In order to address potential duplicate content penalties, manipulate your.htaccess file and redirect secondary domains to the preferred listing. This means every time a web user enters the yoursitesite.com address without the preferred prefix, they are redirected to the correct domain.

Just add the following code to your .htaccess file (change the “yoursite” to your domain):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

It is a simple solution to a potential pain in the rear brought on by a simple case of mistaken identity. Remember that when you are dealing with Googlebots you are dealing with bots that are not programmed to think.

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