If content on different urls is the same, search engines don’t know which url to show in the search results. We call this a duplicate content issue. And it can hurt your rankings! Unfortunately it happens more often than you’d think. Did you, for instance, ever think about the consequences of www or non www versions of your site?
At Ask Yoast, we received a question about this from Steve Blundell of Avonsci:
“Do the www and non www versions of a page create duplicate content, and if so how can I deal with it?”
Watch the answer in the video below!
www or not?
“The answer is yes, it creates duplicate content. It’s not the worst kind of duplicate content, because Google knows that these things happen, but it’s better to fix it nonetheless. The best way of fixing it is to choose one, either the www or the non www version and to redirect the other to it. So on Yoast.com we redirect www.yoast.com to yoast.com. We did that, because we think it’s cooler and www is a bit old fashioned. But, choose whatever suits you best, redirect the other and you’re done!”
Do you have a question about duplicate content, link building or copywriting? Just ask! We’ll be glad to help you out if we can. Send your SEO question to ask@yoast.com!