SEO Codes

With the continuing updates of Google, duplicate content has become a huge topic in the search engine optimization (SEO) world. Duplicate content is a content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (that is, in more than one URL), giving the search engines the difficulty to decide which version is more relevant to a particular search query. Such dilemma will lead the search engines to rarely show multiple duplicate pieces of content and, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original.

For site owners, duplicate content is an issue that needs to be fixed in order to improve or maintain site rankings and to prevent traffic losses as well. Here are some ways to resolve duplicate content:

301 redirect. For this, you have to check the page authority and see if one page has a higher PA than the other. There are various tools for that such as the Open Site Explorer. After that, set up a 301 redirect from the duplicate page to the original page. In this way, they no longer compete with one another in the search results.

rel=canonical. A rel=canonical tag is a special tag that is inserted into the header of HTML that helps communicate to search engine bots the relationship of that piece of content to others on your site. It tells the search engine bots which pieces of content are original or primary ones and which are duplicates. So the bot will pass over the duplicates and only index and give link credit to the primary piece. Add this tag to the HTML head of a web page to tell search engines that it should be treated as a copy of the "canon," or original, page:

noindex, follow. Basically, this code snip tells the search engine robots to not record the information on the page (the noindex part) but to still relate this page to the pages that link out of it (the follow part). You can add the "noindex, follow" to the meta robots tag to tell search engines not to include the duplicate pages in their indexes, but to crawl their links. Here's what it should look like: