Google Webmaster's way to identify Cross Domain Duplicate Content Issues

Google Webmaster Tools sending a new alert message for site owners from today, October 31st, 2011, to let them know as soon as a specific URL doesn’t appear due to duplication of a cross domain URL on another cross domain. This will cut off the webmaster’s frustration on identifying and resolving cross domain duplicate content penalization issues.

Webmaster can view this alert in the Google Webmaster Tool’s message center and at present, Google is sending alert messages from the Top Pages’ URLs report. This will give the site owners an idea on why certain pages don’t appear in search results. I’ll be explaining below in this article with details on things a webmaster needs to do while getting an alert.

Understanding and resolving the Cross-Domain issues 

If you have a content on your website that accesses that content from another website, or it could be group of pages that may contain URLs from the same site or from different sites or multiple domains and pages that are pointing to any specific URL, then it will be the cross-domain. 

There are multiple causes for cross domain issue, and few causes could be, duplicate content including multi-regional websites, configuration mistakes (like incorrect canonicalization, misconfigured servers, and so on), scrapped content, malicious website attacks, etc.

Webmasters can resolve this cross-domain issue by placing a rel=canonical tag in their source code to let them reuse the similar content without losing any of the SEO value or they can resolve it also by reducing the content similarity by 60%. If you use rel=canonical tag, Google will reflect one sole URL as a representative if it found a same piece of content in several URLs.

I’m contributing as an SEO Expert so long and having extensive knowledge in Google Webmaster Tools. I’ve incorporated search strategy into my clients’ websites of all levels. Subscribe my blog to get more updates on optimization strategies.