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Website navigation and duplicate content

Duplicate content is currently a hot topic in SEO community and It seems duplicate content issue would not be going anywhere in next 2 , 3 years.

Blogs and Websites with the very little amount of content may in future face Google penalty because of high amount of internal duplicate content.

I compared my homepage with other pages of my site and I got quite shocked to found that the ratio of similar content is above 70%, some pages of my site with very little content like video and image posts have 94% similar content ratio. This is because of my sites navigation and the widgets I'm using on my blog which remains same for every post and are also present on homepage. Search engines index whole pages which includes navigation and widgets text also, so posts with no content having only few images and video can make matters worse for you.

Here are Few tips to reduce duplicate content

Use JavaScript or Ajax to output content that you may think is mandatory but is creating duplicate content issues
Try to remove unnecessary widgets.
Make your homepage unique.
Use JavaScript to output content that you don't want search engines to index.
Improve your site navigation and try to use only important and single keywords in your menus.
Use meta robot tag noindex on those pages which you don’t want google to index.

You can use this free tool to find similar content Similar Page Checker

If the ratio of similar content is above 50% you should need to worry and if it is above 70% You should follow above tips otherwise Google could penalize you or may be your individual post ranking will drop.

If you have suggestions and tips please share them with us. Thanks for Reading

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Sunday, April 10, 2011