If you want more traffic from Google, then get rid of your duplicate pages. If you have 2 pages that have the same content, Google doesn’t “split” the traffic. They just reduce the traffic. Google is EXTREMELY good at finding duplicate content.
To find your pages that duplicate content go to http://www.google.com/webmasters and sign in. The first time you’ll need to validate that you’re the owner/admin for that site. After that click on “Diagnostics” then “Content analysis”. There are 2 numbers that you want to look at. The more important one is “Duplicate title tags”. Google wants each page to have a unique title. Secondly, they want a unique meta description.
If you click on “Duplicate title tags” it will show you the different pages that have the same title tags.
However, you may get some big result!
Google thinks that http://www.jaygeiger.com/index.php/about/ and http://www.jaygeiger.com/index.php/About/ are 2 different pages. (One “about” has a capital ‘A’)
For this blog, I don’t really care so much because it is mostly for fun and writing down thoughts. However for other sites that I need Google traffic from, this could be a problem.
Handling this can be a little tricky. For each page you need to analyze the URL. If the capitalization doesn’t match then you need to 301 redirect to the correct page. Google is really good at noting duplicate content but it isn’t good at realizing when 2 URLs are actually the same.
Post a comment about your specific duplicate content problem and I’ll try to help you solve it.
