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When you carry out site optimization sometimes you may notice that some of the pages with the same content are available at several URLs at once. In such a situation we can say that there are duplicate web pages on the site. Effective site optimization includes struggle against duplicate content.
If two or more web pages are completely identical but have different URLs, they are purely duplicate web pages. If the co-incidence is only partial, such pages are referred to as near-duplicate pages. Duplicate or near-duplicate pages may appear because of specific features of the CMS (content management system) used on the site. Duplicate web pages may become a serious problem for site optimization.
The matter is that site optimization is carried out for strictly determined pages: these pages are referred to by both internal and external links, these pages are promoted in the search engines. If an optimized web page has a duplicate, a web crawler that indexes your site may consider the duplicate page the relevant one, and the optimized page will not acquire high rankings on the SERP (search engine results page).
Consequently all efforts made for search engine optimization may turn out to be in vain. Besides, a duplicate page and the original one may compete with each other in the search results, this will cause additional problems. The ways of getting rid of duplicate web pages and preventing their emergence will differ depending on the type of duplicate web pages.
For example, near-duplicate pages most often include image gallery pages, product item pages, product category pages. These duplicate pages appear because the changeable part of the page content is very small in comparison with the non-changeable one, or because two or more pages contain the same items which are displayed in different order.
Near-duplicate pages are an everyday occurrence for online shops because elimination of such pages worsens web usability and in the long run reduces the number of potential customers. Nevertheless during search engine optimization you should minimize negative influence of near-duplicate pages: the distribution of link weight is optimized with the help of the 301 Redirect.
Pure duplicate web pages, in their turn, include printable versions of certain site pages, pages with session IDs and versions with different extensions. Duplicate web pages may also appear because of specific features peculiar to generation of paths to required documents: for example, the menu item site.com/menu1/page1.html may refer to the page which is also available at another URL in one of the categories: site.com/category1/page1.html.
Existence of such “clones” on websites is inappropriate, therefore in this case you should use on of available methods to eliminate duplicate web pages. Just as in the case with near-duplicate pages you can use the 301 Redirect and concentrate the link weight on the original pages instead of their duplicates. Besides, you can disable indexing of duplicate web pages using robots.txt protocol (instructions placed in robots.txt file).
Site optimization and fight against negative influence of duplicate web pages will be successful if you take care of it beforehand. That is why at the preliminary stage of website development it is very important to choose the most suitable content management system and think out the site structure trying to avoid the emergence of unnecessary duplicates. You can order website development or site optimization in WebStudio2U. The team of our web design studio will make sure that you get the most efficient solution!
TAGS
site optimization,
duplicate web pages,
duplicate pages,
near-duplicate pages,
search engine optimization |
SEO 
