Vanessa Fox on Duplicate Content

Google’s Vanessa Fox has posted an excellent entry on Duplicate Content at the Webmaster Central Blog. She touches on the most common issues in regards to Duplicate Content:

• Specifying the preferred version of a URL in the site’s Sitemap file
• Providing a method for indicating parameters that should be stripped from a URL during indexing
• Providing a way to authenticate ownership of content
• Making a duplicate content report available for site owners
• Working with blogging software and content management systems to address duplicate content issues

Vanessa also mentions the answers to questions that were posed to her at SMX:

• If I nofollow a substantial number of my internal links to reduce duplicate content issues, will this raise a red flag with the search engines?
• Are the search engines continuing the Sitemaps alliance?
• Many pages on my site primarily consist of graphs. Although the graphs are different on each page, how can I ensure that search engines don’t see these pages as duplicate since they don’t read images?
• I’ve syndicated my content to many affiliates and now some of those sites are ranking for this content rather than my site. What can I do?
• As a searcher, I want to see duplicates in search results. Can you add this as an option?

Source: Google Analytics Blog – Vanessa Fox