As a website develops and grows sometimes issues will arise or become apparent which create duplicate content on your website.
Such issues might not be duplicate content specifically created by a person working on the website but a result of an issue with the internal linking structure, CMS or ecommerce platform being used on the site.
Some examples of this include where the pages on a website are available both with and without a trailing slash, for example www.yourdomain.co.uk/products/ and www.yourdomain.co.uk/products and if you create internal links to these pages from around your site as part of your search engine optimisation strategy you need to be careful that all the links are to the correct page (for example www.yourdomain.co.uk/products/) and not the duplicate page. You also need to make sure that the pages you don’t want seeing (those without the trailing slash) redirect to the correct page (with the trailing slash). When an issue like this has been spotted on your website it is also a good idea to use the canonical tag to ensure that the search engines know what the correct URL for the page should be.There is also sometimes an issue with the naming of pages on your website, for example www.yourdomain.co.uk/products/ could also be visible as www.yourdomain.co.uk/products.html so again you need to make sure that all internal links go through to the correct page, that there are 301s in place to stop the pages being seen and that you use the canonical tag on all pages where you know this might be an issue.
Keeping an eye on the pages indexed in Google using the site command can help you to see if there are any issues such as this on your website. You could also ensure that you are regularly creating and checking a sitemap.xml file as this also shows you pages the search engines might find and index which could be duplicates of other pages on your site.
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