Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [166]
In using any of these tools, the key is not to panic! Stay calm and find the specific sources of the problem before you go ranting at someone from IT or calling your web developer. It is best to be calm and research the issue first.
Use Analytics
Using your web analytics program is the first place to find duplicate content issues. When examining the pages that are being requested by visitors, you can filter through all of the pages by using a word or common URL or page title feature.
In Google Analytics, the Content > Top Content report will show the pages that have been requested by visitors in that time period (see Figure 14-13). At this report, go to Filter Page Containing at the bottom of the page listing and add your parameter or page URL. It may take some refining, but you can see what pages are similar or duplicates of the URL. Typically, the duplication can be spotted in the URL extension (.htm and .html), an added parameter, or even a misplaced character in the URL.
Figure 14-13: Use Google Analytics to find duplicated URLs and pages.
Although the Google tools are being represented well in this section, it is important to remember that all search engines rely on the same types of information retrieval (at this point). Google has been aggressive in helping site owners and providing helpful information, so the tools offered are very productive. Any issues uncovered in Google’s Webmaster Tools will also help fix issues in other search engines.
Use Search Results
A very easy way of determining duplicate content is to do a search with a unique string of content from your website.
To do a simple search in Google for uniqueness, type a copied block of content from your website, using quotes, into Google’s search box (see Figure 14-14). In this example, the results show only pages that include the quoted content “The BDP-S370 Blu-ray Disc player features Blu-ray 3D playback, Wi-Fi Internet connectivity, and instant streaming of online video content from the BRAVIA Internet Video platform. When connected to a broadband Internet network.” A portion of this text can be seen in the bold text in every result. As you can see, 51,000 websites use the same manufacturer’s description for this product. Only the popular sites will have any visibility for this content.
Figure 14-14: Searching a quoted sentence to find duplicate content
Keep an Eye Out for Plagiarism!
You may find that some sites are copying your content. If this happens, you can report such things to Google, if it is overly egregious, but it is a common occurrence. An additional resource to find plagiarized content on the Web is Copyscape, www.copyscape.com.
The results shown are all from your website. Using quotes means that you are searching for that exact text. Without quotes, you will get the pages that most closely resemble that phrase. If more than one page shows up in the results for a sentence or two when using quotes, then look at the URLs; if they are different, then you know that you have duplicate content happening on your website.
Ecommerce Duplicate Content
Duplicate content happens a lot with ecommerce sites because those sites that simply republish manufacturer information end up having the same product descriptions on their site as all of their competitors. In that case, no one gets credit for having any unique content.
Ecommerce sites that take the time to rewrite the product content are the ones that will attract search engine visitors. Unique content is different, takes time and investment to create, but results in better rankings. Those sites that republish manufacturer content will not rank well, because they are competing against hundreds to thousands of other sites with the same content.
Identify the Culprits
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to determine how duplicate content arises on your website. There are some traditional methods that will generate duplicate