How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?

[simonberenyi]

Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?

[JamesNorquay]

It is hard to give an accurate percentage, in my eyes if you want to be in the clear just make unique content on pages if it is not unique content then place a canonical tag to the right page.

I mean Google is coming down harder and harder on sites for poor quality content/duplicant content if you play by the rules and do things right tit will be a long term strategy.

[AlanMosley]

James gives a good response.

i have a few tutorial pages, where a lot of the instuctions are the same, but the are still indexed and rank.

It maybe a guide of what you can get a way with

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-trailing-slash
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-upper-and-lower-case

[simonberenyi]

Hi James

I have had a thorough study of this issue today and your ideas have proved fruitful. I checked out the article by Matt Cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/ and then read the article by Rand Fishkin. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps.

it will take a few weeks to implement across the thousand or so pages I have, but it will be interesting to see how or if, it finally affects the root domains ranking.

Many thanks

Simon

[simonberenyi]

Hi Alan

Thankyou for taking the time to offer advice to me. I have read your pages and it does raise some interesting points. One that although basic, is one I haven't yet paid much attention to is the issue of "The choice of www or non-www".

This is interesting in respect of how I set my canonical tags up. I noticed that I rank differently for www.waspkilluk.co.uk than for www.waspkilluk.co.uk/index. So it seems I need to add a canonical tag there. I guess index is my home page - but then isn't the root domain also my default homepage?

In fact - do you think you should set up canonical tags without the www. or won't this work?

Sorry for creating questions from questions.

Warm Regards

Simon

[AlanMosley]

I would not use a canonnical for your www v non www, use a 301

there is a tutorial there also to fix the index.html problem also, these tutorials are for micdrosoft iis server, if you have linux, you need to find the htaccess alternatives.

I always go for the non www, as www is of no use, so why have it, but for you i would look at what your links point to.