For you non-developers, that “!=” means not equal to. That’s right, your duplicate content will not cause your pages to be added to the supplemental index. If you don’t believe me, read on and I will link to a Google page explaining it.
It has been said lately that duplicate content on your site will cause many pages to be added to the Google supplemental index and result in a lower pagerank and reduced SEO. I’ve now learned that this theory is hogwash. That being said, there are reasons to reduce duplicate content and multiple ways to do it.
What is the Supplemental index?
Simply put, the supplemental index is the place that low pagerank pages go to languish. That is why over 90% of my pages were in this index, as only 3 individual pages had a pagerank. This is not the same as what’s been said before on the topic. It was previously stated that the supplemental index contained your duplicate content. Back in May, Nathan Metzger posted how you can keep your blog out of the supplemental index. From what I’ve just learned, this is wrong. OK, I’ve stated definitavely that Nathan was wrong in his definition, but now it my turn to waffle.
Why this isn’t a black and white issue.
I’ve said that duplicate content isn’t the reason that a page gets put in the supplemental index. Now I’d like to say that duplicate content could off-handedly result in getting added to the index. How? If you have duplicate content, the search engines (and other bloggers that link to you) have multiple ways to get to the same content and can split up those incoming links between the versions. Resulting in a lower pagerank than what the actual page deserves. So it is still good practice to eliminate your duplicate content as much as possible.
How can I reduce my duplicate content?
I’ll give you a few bulleted points on how to do this, if you want more detail, let me know and I would be happy to help.
- Edit your robots.txt file to tell the search engine not to follow the unwanted pages.
- Â Specify the preferred version of a URL in your sitemap file.
- For you wordpress users, use the duplicate-content-cure plugin.
- Manually do what the plugin does by adding the noindex tag to the problem pages.
I promised you that I would link to a Google page explaining why duplicate content doesn’t cause a page to enter the supplemental index so there ya go.