Quality Content Not Duplicate Content

Sunday, June 5th, 2011 at 10:27 am

Keeping my goals in front of me keeps me focused.

One of my goals is original content. Google has a document that provides guidance on how to do well on Google. Following the Google WebMaster Guidelines helps Google find, index, and rank your site as you learn to internet market. It’s also a good idea to read these guidelines and see what kinds of behaviors can cause a site to be penalized or de-indexed entirely by Google.

Google Quality Guidelines

One of the things Google’s specific quality guidelines is:

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. In short, duplicate content is substantive blocks of content on a site that either completely match other content or are substantially similar.

Google, as with all search engines, is in the business of providing search results to its visitors. It wants to provide unique, accurate results to search requests. In order to do so, it needs to filter out duplicate content. Google spends a lot of its algorithm filtering out duplicate content. You don’t want your site to be viewed as duplicate content and ranked lower or de-indexed.

WordPress Archives

In terms of a WordPress site, like this one, duplicate content can easily get created depending on what you allow the search robots to crawl. Specifically, your Archives category should not be archived. Every post I write will be assigned to a category. I’m naming my categories based on my keywords. I want my posts and my categories to be indexed by Google. But everything on the site is also going to belong to the Archives category. If I allow this to be indexed by Google, I have created duplicate content.

All In One SEO

In my post about adding WordPress Plug ins, I mention the importance of All In One SEO. Make the following updates to the All In One SEO settings to both avoid getting duplicate content indexed and insure that the SEO Categories are indexed.

First, select All In One SEO, the plug in is already installed, from the Settings section in the left frame of the dashboard.