Duplicate Content: The Evil Twin Sister

I came across a terrific article today by one of the many search marketing experts on staff at iProspect. In the article The Evil Twin Sister: Duplicate Content, Errin White makes many of the points I've made here on the blog in the past about the need to avoid duplicate content.

Some highlights:

"By utilizing duplicate content, you risk losing your site’s credibility from both an SEO and user perspective".

"Only one domain will be chosen as the authority domain, which may not be your company’s main point of focus, and rank on related keyword phrases while the other domain(s) is left out of the search engine index"

Errin recommends following these three steps to avoid duplicate content penalties:

1. Focus SEM efforts on one domain

2. Take down duplicate domains and implement 301 redirects in their place in order to drive users and search engine spiders to the chosen domain

3. Utilize unique page content on every page, the same content should never be available on more than one URL

Good advice!