5 Ways to Avoid Duplicate Content on Your Website

Before you can get an excellent ranking on a page, it must be crawled and indexed. There are number of techniques you can use to increase the opportunity of your pages to be indexed in the search results. At InterActive Circle, we can provide you with the services you need to enhance exposure and profitability of your business website.

Here are some ways to avoid duplicate content on your website and increase the indexing opportunity of your pages in search engine results:

1. Understand the Content of Google’s Index
First off, check the number of pages of your website Google reports as indexed. You can simply run a search on Google with “site:example.com” to check how many pages Google has indexed.

2. Manage URL parameters
Duplicate content and infinite spaces are often due to URL parameters which significantly dilute signals and restrain crawl budget. These consist of variables added to the structure of your URL that contain server instructions for the following purposes:

• Store user session info
• Sort items
• Customize the appearance of a page
• Filter items
• Signal information to Google Analytics or track ad campaigns
• Return in-site search results

3. Optimize sitemaps, Navigation Links and robots.txt
These are the elements that are crucial for effective indexation. Having a site map is extremely important – it may even be of greater importance than internal links. Having your robots.txt file functional is also important. You don’t want it to prevent Google from accessing any part of your site for indexation. It must also indicate the location of your sitemap.

Additionally, it is important to have a logical and intuitive navigational link structure for proper indexation. Proper categorization is crucial. Every page in your site should be accessible from at least one link on your site.

4. Correct use of noindexing and canonicalization
Canonicalization indicates to the search engines that two or more URLs are the same page, but one of them is the canonical or “official” page. Noindexing instructs the search engines not to index a particular page.

SEO authority is maintained through canonicalization. For this reason, for near duplicates or actual duplicates this is preferred over no-indexing. If you do not need a particular version of the page index, you should use a noindex. However, it is not recommended to use canonicalization and that noindex simultaneously.

5. Good and bad filters
To canonicalize or noindex filters properly, follow this principle: a good filter should help pinpoint a product and provide a meaningful extension of your various product categories to result in different but substantial pages.