Duplicate content is a major dilemma for many sites, as most of the site owners do not even realize that their site is being penalized by Google and other search engines. Canonicalization is an important factor that should be taken care, as the web page having the identical content can be accessed by multiple URL's on the same or from an external website. When Google indexes your website and if your homepage shows up multiple times, then your site gets penalized from having duplicate content.

It's highly important to avoid this sort of duplicate content wherever possible before uploading your website. Try not to have more than one version per page and also make sure that your content management system creates standardized URL's which are always same. Different landing pages or indexes can be used, but be sure that you have different content rather than stuffing the same content of material to the site and to be penalized.

Even if you do not deceive the search engines and believe that your site has unique content, your site may still get penalized for having the duplicate content. The search engine robots filter out the duplicate content by determining the content of the sites with the complex set of algorithms. One of the easiest ways to check the instance of the duplicate content is by picking certain content from a page and perform a search on Google. This search will return the instances of duplicate content that exists on the sites.

The duplicate content issue can be figured out by inserting a canonical link or by setting up with a 301 redirect, which may avoid you from losing the Page Rank and typically transfers upwards of 99% of authority from the original page to the redirected page. The site with the unique content would rank higher for certain key phrases. You are able to eliminate as much of duplicate content as you can with the utilization of these tools and can help the search engines to determine that your site is as unique as possible.