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Google will now alert you if your site has duplicate content issues

November 01, 2011 | Online Marketing

Google webmaster tools has launched a new message alert to let site owners know when a particular URL doesn’t appear because Google sees it as duplicate of a URL on a different domain.

This new feature alerts site owners when their “algorithms select an external URL instead of one from their website”. They say common reasons for this include:

- Site owner-specified – if you’ve moved your domain or have implemented the rel=canonical attribute to indicate that a page on another domain is canonical, then this alert is simply confirmation that Google is indexing as you’ve specified.

- Regional sites – if you have the same content on multiple regional sites (for instance, the same English content on a .com (for US), a .co.uk, and a .com.au), Google may cluster pages with identical content across sites and use relevance signals to determine which to display per query.

- Incorrect canonicalization – in this case, a page may inadvertently use the rel=canonical attribute to specify a page on a different domain as canonical.

- Misconfigured server – a hosting misconfiguration (this in particular happens sometimes with shared hosting) may cause a two different domains to display the same content)

- Hacked site – sites are sometimes hacked to point to other domains.

- Scraped content – the blog says that “in rare situations”, Google may select a URL from a site that has scraped your content.

Get the full story at Search Engine Land

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