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Duplicate content is a problem for search engines, and that makes it a problem for SEOs. Google  strongly dislikes including the same content more than once in search results, and if content exists in more than one place on a site, search engine algorithms have trouble determining which version they should include or exclude. They also have difficulty knowing where to assign link juice and authority. This confusion can lead to sites experiencing a loss of traffic and reduced SERP rankings. The “rel=canonical” element is intended to help search engines out by letting them know which page is “the page” when it comes to particular content.

Duplicate content from the perspective of search engine crawlers can be created in a couple of different ways. Sites can actually have the same content on two different pages of their site or they can have links that differ yet point to the same content — these both look the same to the crawlers. Continue reading →

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Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in recent days will be aware that GoDaddy recently suffered an outage that left millions of its client’s websites inaccessible. While this sort of downtime will obviously affect a site’s traffic and therefore revenue, many people are asking whether it will have an effect on their SEO.

The short answer to that question is no, probably not. Google is generally not happy when they coming knocking and find that a site in their index has apparently disappeared, but they are also aware that problems occur, and so long as they don’t occur regularly then a site’s SERP ranking is unlikely to be degraded. Reliability is important, and a site that is regularly down will take a ranking hit, but a short period of unavailability is an anomaly, not a trend that is useful as a signal.

With that specific case dealt with, it might be useful to consider the more general case of downtime and how it should be handled. It’s occasionally necessary to take a site down for various reasons: making large scale changes to the software or server, for example. How are we to handle this?

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