Struggling with duplicate content woes? Google’s done a blog post today to try and provide further advice and guidance. Among the highlights:

• Including a preferred URL in sitemaps submitted to Google can increase the chances that the URL you want is used, in cases where content can be found within your own site in different ways.
   
• Consider using 301 redirects, blocking, consistent linking, and other tips covered in this and this, which are official Google blog posts.
   
• To deal with offsite content that ranks above you, ensure that your site itself is being crawled and not-penalized by Google.
   
• Consider tips like providing slightly alternate versions of your content for syndication; use absolute links back to your own content or ask partners to block your content from being crawled. These come from a post that post-Google Vanessa Fox did recently on her personal blog: Ranking As The Original Source For Content You Syndicate.

Related Topics: SEO: Duplicate Content

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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