Duplicate content has been the subject of many debates. However, I’ve seen a new twist on duplicate content lately that is undeniable. I listened to a webinar on dublicate content related to how your domain name is indexed..such as:

http://www.bothegermanshepherd.com
http://www.bothegermanshepherd.com/
http://www.bothegermanshepherd.com/index.htm
http://bothegermanshepherd.com
http://bothegermanshepherd.com/
http://bothegermanshepherd.com/index.htm

All go to the same place however the search engines see each url as a different page. Since you can’t control how others write your url, you could have any or all of these combinations and since they might all be indexed google could interpret them as duplicate content. If there were a way to cause the spiders to see all these sites as one, it could be possible to increase the page rank of your main site by reducing the diluting due to the duplicate content issue.

This week I listend to a webinar from the Stompernet promotions that were going on for the last two weeks. However, Jason Katzenback of Portalfeeder fame put together a quick video with a great explaination and included the code needed to help solve the problem.

Jason Katzenback is one of the good guys, I was a member of Portalfeeder when it first started but had to drop out due to illness. It was a great program with tremendous teaching, if you evever get an opportunity to join…jump at it!

Here’s the video:

This is just an image of the code Jason provided:

If you need the code for the htaccess file, htaccess file for duplicate content

Here’s my disclaimer:

I take no responsibility for this code or for the results. If you aren’t familiar with editing htaccess files please consider asking for help or hiring someone to do the work