Duplication issues and 301 Redirects

Before we get into the nitty gritty of optimising your website page by page I would like to talk about duplication. Google isn't very fond of duplicate content. If it finds the same content on more than one of your pages it might not rank them very highly. There are a few cases where it is possible that Google may see something as duplicate content that might not be obvious to you. If your website shows up at http://yoursite.ie and http://www.yoursite.ie, then Google may regard all of your pages as having a duplicate page - http://yoursite.ie/page1.html and http://www.yoursite.ie/page1.html. Using 301 Redirects can prevent this issue. The normal method is to use a 301 redirect on the http://yoursite.ie/ pages that will redirect to the equivalent http://www.yoursite.ie/ pages. This also applies if you have both .com and .ie addresses - you should use 301 redirects from http://yoursite.com/ and http://www.yoursite.com/ pages to http://www.yoursite.ie/ pages (assuming you have chosen http://www.yoursite.ie/ as your favoured address). Also, Google may see http://www.yoursite.ie/ and http://www.yoursite.ie/index.html as two different pages with the same content. Making sure that all internal homepage links point to http://www.yoursite.ie/ rather than http://www.yoursite.ie/index.html can help to prevent this issue. If you find any backlinks (external links) that point to index.html, you could ask the webmaster to update the link to point to http://www.yoursite.ie/. This issue would also apply to index.asp or index.php etc. as well as index.html.