In an effort to constantly stay on top of best practice SEO strategies, we have found that Google is seriously cracking down on duplicate content. When Google catches what it considers duplicate content, it simply filters out the content, acting as if it does not exist. So just what is considered duplicate content?

Well unfortunately my name isn’t Matt Cutts, and I don’t work for Google. So until Google releases a strict set of guidelines as to how it crawls, what it looks for, and what triggers their algorithm’s duplicate content filters, we are going to have to rely on other methods.

TriMark Solutions has found a very useful website used to examine duplicate content, and wouldn’t you know it’s called http://duplicatecontent.net.

So how does it work? Simply enter in a pair of URLs, and the tool will almost immediately return results pertaining to:
• HTML Fingerprinting
• HTML Distribution Value
• Total HTML Similarity
• Standard Text Similarity
• Smart Text Similarity
• Total Text Similarity

All values are returned as a percentage, and obviously the higher the percentages are, the more similar the content is. The site even has a nice little FAQ section to help you understand it a bit better. They also even include a link to add the tool to your own website. (not too self-promoting, eh?)

In order to test the accuracy, I entered two of our landing pages which still had the same content and layout, and sure enough every field came back 100%. Our two sites were completely identical except for domain names.

This tool is useful because it provides us with a numerical value of duplicate content, and it works in real-time, which means you can make constant changes to your website until you’ve lowered your duplicate content value to a percentage with which you feel comfortable.

Keep checking in with the TriMark Solutions Blog for more useful SEO tips and tools.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 8:14 am and is filed under Duplicate Content, Internet Marketing, SEO - Tip of The Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.