Avoid duplicate content in your websites: A common problem faced in SEO is duplication of content. Though it may seem like a small issue, it poses serious threat to the websites’ ranking. According to Google, “duplicate content refers to considerable blocks of content within or across domains that match completely or partly”.

But how does having similar content affect your ranking? Let me explain the process. Google or any search engine for that matter gets confused when it finds multiple identical content. Either the search engines doesn’t list any of them or chooses the one which according to the search engine is closest to the original version. Sometimes you may duplicate content within your own website. So duplication of content occurs intentionally and also by accident. At the end of it, all your SEO efforts will go waste if search engine finds many similar content. So how to boost your rankings without duplication? Are there ways to manage it? Yes. It is easy to avoid these mistakes if you follow few simple steps.

Remove repeated content from your domain. This happens mainly due to webmasters ignorance or due to improper internal linking system of the website. Remove or change content in pages that are repetitive. Always use unique original content.

Redirect your removed page to ‘301 redirect’. Once you have decided to take down few pages from your website, make sure you reroute back to your website with this HTML command.

Use an image if needed. If your website has some kind of tagline or slogan, see that you place it once in text and link only that for search engines. For others, you can your tagline as a image which will prevent duplication.

Use backlink checker. You can use the backlink checker in Yahoo or any other website online and see who is already linked to your page. Go for a version that has access to more people.

Printer-friendly version, session ids are common areas to look for duplication.

Plagiarism check. With so many free online plagiarism tools, its easy to check for originality of your content.

Always keep your website clean of duplicate content for good search engine rankings and more traffic to your site.