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Joomla SEO Part 1 - Duplicate content and how to prevent it

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In this guide, we will be looking at inproving your search engine rankings on your Joomla website. Much can be done on a standard Joomla website and we will take a deeper look at the most important things you can change.

This guide will cover:
  1. Dublicate URL's and how to prevent them
  2. Search Engine Friendly URL's and the use of title alias
  3. Better content titles (H1)
  4. Linked titles
  5. Meta tags
Today we will be looking at part 1

A common problem with joomla is with what's know as "duplicate content" - in a few words it means content that you can access from several URL's. Douplicate content is a genuine problem that you should take serious, but fortunately there are ways to eliminate the problem.

Does it matter you may ask?
Yes it really does.
First of all, in case of duplicate content, your linkvalue is distributed over several pages insted of just one and that matters!

Second, you leave it up to google to descide which url they'll index. You should be the one in control and NOT leave it up to e.g. Google to make this kind of discissions.

Third, when Googlebot visits your website it expects a certain number of pages to crawl. If you suddenly have many pages with duplicate content, you are using up your "crawling budget" on pages that could be better spent on unique content.

This can in some cases leed Google into a "loop" that in worst case could results in a poor indexing of your site and bad rankings as a result of that. So even though it's not Google's intent do punish you, duplicate content can result in "punishment".

Duplicate content will result in mange pages in google suplemental index - you do NOT want this. To many pages in the suplemental index could damage your "trust value".
Duplicate content is also "repeated content" like website navigation, news boxes, short "global" text's etc. so make sure you minimize them as much as you can. There is no exact value for how much of your content that should be unique, but as a general guideline at least 50% on every page should be unique.

So knowing how duplicate content can damage your website, what can be done to prevent it?

Actually there's only one thing you can do, and that is to install a 3. party SEF component. I would recommend you to use sh404SEF , but using a SEF component is not something you do without testing first on a development/cloned website.

But it's time well spent to really learn how to use e.g. sh404SEF. On our Joomla course we will cover installation, setup and "what you need to know" about running a site with sh404SEF.

Enjoy :-)
And remember, if you have any questions or suggestions to our guides, then please post it in our members forum in the section this guide belongs to.

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