Up now is Todd Friersen of Position Tech to talk about duplicate content.

Todd is a *reformed* black hat spammer. Duplicate content was the standard practice back in those days when he used to do SEO for viagra and other pharma web sites. Build 100 websites and slap up duplicate content.

Todd makes the point that duplicate content can happen easily, even with your home page. Showed 5 or 6 examples of homepage and web server configuration issues. Google *may* decide on the right version of the home page, but you should really tell them which one if you can.

Rel=canonical / 301 redirect = your friend to solve this issue

Faceted Navigation

– products exist in many categories e.g. Tigerproducts.com uses it, Dell uses it

– categories are flexible and unordered

– results are in crazy amounts of duplicate content

– problem. Web site ends up with 200K products but 4 million URLs

No need to do worry, Todd says. Create a directory structure that encourages Googlebot to come in via a specific way, but block all the dupe pages out of Google’s index.

Regional Domains

– AU, US, CA, UK etc.

– country.example.com

– example.com/country

– example.com/index.htm?lang=en

– country specific TLDs

This is easy to resolve, says Todd. You can use Rel=canonical or simply login to GG Webmaster Tools and tell Google what country your domain, sub-domain, or folder is associated with. Do this!

Multiple Sites and Microsites

– Keyword Domains. Bleurgh

– Why are you doing this?

– Stop it. Stop it now.

– Consolidate your sites and your effort (and this will concentrate all your link popularity to one site as well).

– Actually, Bing likes microsites. If you have to do it, do it for Bing. They love it.