Are you linking consistently to the same URLs throughout the site with unique anchor text? make sure you use or don’t use www consistently and set it correctly in webmaster tools

Robots.txt file – Are you preventing the duplicate page from being spidered?

• Pattern matching
• * = matches any sequence of characters
• $ = matches the end of a URL

Canonical Tag – tells the search engine what the best url is for your web site.

301 redirects – change of address card for search engine

NOFOLLOW attribute is basically a hint or a cue. It doesn’t mean the search engines won’t follow it. Don’t use it on pages that are important to your users. Use it on pages with forms that you don’t want the search engines to fill out.

XML Sitemap

• Be consistent and be proactive
• Don’t robots exclude a page and then put it in your sitemap

StoneTemple Consulting – How to Syndicate Content Safely

301 Redirects

301 redirect eliminates duplicate content altogether, but it doesn’t cause the pages to cease to exist. Redirects link juice back to the canonical page. (301 redirect doesn’t move all of the link juice, but probably 99%). Change any links on your site to point to the canonical page.

Rel=canonical

The duplicate page remains and still gets crawled, but it’s only a suggestion. The search engine doesn’t have to follow the canonical instruction. The reason is that search engines find that webmasters make mistakes with canonical a lot of the time. Mistakes happen all the time. Google doesn’t care if your first. They want the best content for the user.

Webmaster Tools

In Webmaster Tools, you can tell the search engines to ignore parameters.

noindex

If you syndicate your content, you should make sure it is noindexed. Search engines sometimes prefer the syndicatee, instead of the original creator of the content. If you noindex a page, it keeps the duplicate out of the index, but the page will still be crawled. It can still pass link juice/pagerank through to other page.s

Pseudo Dupes – Duplicate Titles

Title tags are one of the most powerful on page ranking factors and give a strong hint to search engines on what a page is about. Duplicate title tags may cause a page to not rank, much the same as an actual duplicate page.

Syndicating Content

Syndicating exact copies of content is a bad idea. Just because it works today, doesn’t mean it will work in the future.

Syndicating content is a great way to get quality links back to your site. Don’t syndicate your content to the point that you no longer rank for it.

Good Syndication creates new original content based on your existing subject matter expertise. It’s a great way to get visibility.

Divide your writing efforts by creating new original articles. Publish some of them on your own site and syndicate the rest to 3rd parties and watch the link juice flows. It also gives users a reason to go to your site because there is different content on your site.

3 major syndication options

• synopsize
• rel-canonical
• create new original content

Helpful tools to check for duplicate content: write a script or use Majestic SEO