Google recently have been working hard on developing tools and new methods to combat duplicate content. 301’s remain the best fix and prevention is best done with robots.txt blocks and nofollow, but the new tools are great if you can’t get access to redirect or block.

Duplicate content causes a split of page rank, can cause some pages to be filtered from rankings but big websites seem to not care about the issue. If the big site’s don’t care about it, why should a site for a small business concentrate on often making lengthy changes or spend time on re-directs that some sites don’t even bat an eyelid at the issue?

Let’s have a look at some examples.

BBC

On the whole the SEO on the BBC is good but they do have a duplicate content issue on the site. I first pointed this out in a post back in February. The problem seen was two URL’s for each page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/7831046.stm

You also have a second URL, the difference it’s in the folder sport2 and not sport1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/7831046.stm

On top of that there is also the low graphic version of the page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/low/football/teams/b/blackpool/7831046.stm

And under the sport2 folder

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/low/football/teams/b/blackpool/7831046.stm

Facebook

Another post I did a while ago where your profile can be loaded up on two URL’s

http://www.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

and

http://en-gb.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

Also some profiles now appearing with ?_fb_noscript=1 after the URL’s. That example above isn’t indexed but these two are http://www.facebook.com/wgardner69 and http://en-gb.facebook.com/wgardner69?_fb_noscript=1 some random person!

LinkedIn

Spotted by a work colleague of mine Neil Walker (follow him on twitter @theukseo) he noticed LinkedIn had a duplication problem with two URL’s for his profile.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/neil-walker/4/41a/793

http://www.linkedin.com/in/internetmarketingoptimisation

Travel Supermarket & Virgin Media

Another spot form Neil was a very strange duplication on Travel Supermarket & Virgin Media. This time it looked like they have duplicated content on a sub domain rather than having two URL’s for one page of content.

Twitter

Can’t remember who spotted this (please comment and I’ll link) but twitter has a https duplication problem and a mobile sub domain duplicating.

m.twitter.com/johnpcampbell

https://twitter.com/johnpcampbell

Looking today there is also explore.twitter.com/johnpcampbell indexed but they have a fix in place in the form of a 301 re-direct to twitter.com/johnpcampbell

Should you still care about duplicate content?

In all these example due to the size and the power of the sites it’s not really having an adverse effect on their overall performance (like throwing a dart at godzilla! he’s not going to feel a thing). Google seems to be able to work out which is the correct URL to display. It would be nice to know the effects of correcting this as these sites have so many pages.

Just a little fix to stop duplicate content on twitter would cut the crawling time of Google allowing the search engine to spider more pages. Unfortunately we’ll never know but I’ll keep on fixing site-wide duplicate content issues.

Do you thing big companies need to sort out duplicate content issues? Add a comment

A huge part of being a good SEO is digesting news, blogs, views, reports, whitepapers and filtering out the crap. He’s a list of 25 companies in the UK offering SEO services who are publishing some content that isn’t crap. They range from the small to the large but all tend to push out good content on RSS.

Links to Site in alphabetical order

Amaze
Base One
Big Mouth Media
Branded3
Bronco
Data Dial
Distilled
Fresh Egg
Further
Green Light
I Crossing
Just Search Ltd
Lake Star Media
Latitude
NorthSouthMedia
Push On
Receptional
redsauce
SEO Consult
SEO Optimise
Site Visibility
Stuck On
The SEO Company
Verve Search

RSS Feeds in alphabetical order

Amaze
Base One
Big Mouth Media
Branded3
Bronco
Data Dial
Distilled
Fresh Egg
Further
Green Light
I Crossing
Just Search Ltd
Lake Star Media
Latitude
NorthSouthMedia
Push On
Receptional
redsauce
SEO Consult
SEO Optimise
Site Visibility
Stuck On
The SEO Company
Verve Search

Download as an OPML file to upload into Google Reader (26th bonus RSS is this blog)

Twitter Accounts – 18 account 6 missing (Branded3, Data Dial, Further, Push On, redsauce, The SEO Company)

amazeplc
baseonegroup
bigmouthmedia
bronco
distilled
freshegg
Warren_Cowan
icrossing_uk
justsearching
lakestarmedia
Latitude_Group
northsouthmedia
Receptional
seoconsult
seoptimise
SiteVisibility
StuckonSEO
LisaDMyers

Follow all in one click with http://tweepml.org/25-UK-SEO-Companies/

Missed any off ? Then please add to the comments and I’ll add them on the post if they are any good!

EDIT A few to add from comments from people

Verticle Leap – RSS @verticleleap

MediaEdge – No RSS – @MECmanchester

MediaVest – No RSS – @mediavest_leeds

Ayima – No RSS – No Twitter

Recently I posted about using a Facebook application to help increase twitter followers. The application takes your tweets and sets then as Facebook updates.

Using Twitter Counter you can see that’s it’s had no impact.

So will linking your twitter account to Facebook increase twitter followers. No.

In a series of blog posts I’m going to not only look at how to increase Twitter followers but also try to put the methods into practice in a bid to increase my pitiful 21 Twitter followers.

One method I’ve noticed some accounts using is to increase Twitter followers using Facebook, you can easily link your Facebook account to display your twitter posts as your Facebook status.

1. All you need is a) a Facebook account and b) a twitter account.
2. On Facebook go to the Twitter application page (search for twitter).

3. Sign up for the application by entering your Twitter username and password.

4. Click the button at the top of the Twitter application page to enable your tweets to update as your Facebook status.

Pretty simple to set up. You should also add a link to your twitter page on your Facebook info tab.

So will this increase Twitter followers? It really depends on the amount of friends you have on Facebook, I’ve only got 170 and most of them are not necessarily going to have Twitter accounts. We’ll see what effect this increased visibility has on followers over the next week

So you’ve signed up to twitter, your twittering away and now you want to track the number of followers on twitter. Well you can use twittercounter which tracks the number of followers over a period of time.

I’ve hit the grand total of 20 follower on my twitter account (@johnpcampbell), I’m looking at trying to increase that over the next few months. I’ve not actively tried to increase followers and before I do that it’s important to work out which methods of increasing visitors work.

twittercounter creates a page for your account (http://twittercounter.com/johnpcampbell) and then generates a graph so show follower levels over time.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to be trying different methods of increasing followers and twittercounter.com should act as the tracking to see which method is the most successful.

In the past few weeks I’ve been playing around with twitter and I must say I’ve been converted. I signed up for the site a few months ago for another site of mine but there’s not much twittering about Blackpool FC.

The basic concept seems to be write and post interesting stuff, get followers and then you pull traffic to what you post. Hopefully some of that traffic will link to some of the stuff you post. So it’s a great tool for SEO. Also you might be able to in contact with ‘influential’ people, which again can help you gain links.

It seems to help having an iPhone so you can post on the go helps, but I’ve not done any drunken twittering yet which might not be helpful.