Names AT Names - Domain Name Information Site

Ensuring All Pages Are Unique

In order to avoid any duplication penalties from search engines, webmasters need to ensure that only pages with unique content will be allowed in the search engines' indexes. There could be pages in your site which look too similar, maybe only through the search engine's eyes.

For many search engines the title, the URL and the meta description of pages found on the internet are compared against various algorithms to determine if it is a unique page or whether it is a duplicate page (meaning it exists either within your website or at another website).

Getting a unique title, URL and description for your pages is therefore crucial if you want to have any real chances against the competition. Sometimes your pages may have very similar titles, urls and descriptions. Take a closer look at all your pages and compare your titles/urls for similarities.

A real life example is websites publishing news. Say your site is about politics, the following example illustrates the duplication problem, from an angle you may have not thought of before.

News Item 1:

Title: Tony Blair Addresses the Parliament on Climate Change
URL: http://www.yourregistereddomainname.com/news-items/tony-blair-addresses-the-parliament-on-climate.html

News Item 2:

Title: Climate Change Prompts Blair to Take Action
URL: http://www.yourregistereddomainname.com/news-items/climate-change-prompts-blair-to-take-action.html

Can you spot the problem? I think it is all clear now. Webmasters need to ensure that all pages have unique titles, urls and descriptions. Otherwise websites could suffer immensely, especially the ones which are not considered as an authority or are only a few months old.