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Duplicate content is something that you may already have present on your website. Don't worry! We're going to talk about how to fix it right now.

Duplicate content is something that you may already have present on your website. Don't worry! We're going to talk about how to fix it right now.

Let's start by going over the two main types of duplicate content issues.

1. Exact Duplication - two identical pages on your website.

2. Close Duplication - two pages that are so similar, the difference may be only a word or two.

There is another type of duplication that you should be aware of, but don't necessarily need to be concerned with. This is external duplication, and only really becomes a problem with large numbers of pages having the same content.

The type you'll come across most often is close duplication. Content management systems are often responsible for this type of duplication. Primarily, when you have a database of products being pulled into a template system, but haven't spent any time developing the descriptions for each product to allow diversity among your pages.

Exact duplicates are generally caused when your website displays pages with the WWW at the front or not. VTSearchMarketing.com goes to the same place as www.VTSearchMarketing.com. This can be a problem; however there is a simple solution.

Bounce over to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Once you install this on your website, you'll then have a preference to let Google know to treat both versions as one.

You'll also want to be sure that all the links on your website link the same way. You can link to your homepage by www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html (or default.aspx). Both of those appear the same, but you can help the search engines by being consistent with your linking throughout your pages.

For near duplicate pages we have a couple of options.

By far the best option is to add relevant content to those pages. Both the spiders and your website visitors will thank you for it.

The other option is to use Google Webmaster Tools to create a robots.txt file for your site.

Most major search engines will look for this file before crawling your website. The file lets you tell the search engine what pages to index and what pages to skip over.

Disallow: /security.html

Or even whole folders on your site

Disallow: /images

Reducing the amount of duplicate content on your website can have give you a significant boost in rankings once the spiders have had time to crawl your site and notice all the clean-up you've done.

Since you ultimately have control over all of the links and content on your own website, the search engines take very seriously how well you manage those elements when deciding how to rank your pages.

Fix the pages that have duplicate content.

Recently, Google webmaster tools was updated to show you duplicate content issues on your own site. By going to Diagnostics - Crawl errors, you'll be given a list of pages Google isn't to psyched about.

Check back often, as sometimes it can take months or even several months for Google to post this information after crawling your website.