Without a doubt, the Wordtracker SEO case study for the Chicago Tribune and LA times is the best case study for SEO that we have read to date.

What makes it so interesting is that it revolves around ‘news’ as a subject which is always a hot topic for SEO strategy.

News and blogs and links, it makes for a fantastic example of what can be done. The sheer scale of the achievement is impressive, the problems encountered during the effort were significant and the satisfaction must be enormous.

The final reason is that it shows enormous consequences for their organisations that don’t do SEO.

If you look for Search Engine Optimisation on the web, after 5 minutes you’ll see this phrase ‘duplicate content‘ start to pop up. Even worse sounding is ‘canonicalisation‘ , often spelt (incorrectly?) as canonicalization on the other side of the pond.

They’re loosely related issues, and together these are the root of the most common of SEO problems and a lot of websites ’suffer’ from it.

By the way, ‘Suffer’ is another one of those SEO people phrases. The rules say you have to come up with emotional language that is inversely proportional to the amount of dull technicality, which these issues definitely are.

Lets get to the point.

You can test for this very easily – many pages on your website may say exactly the same thing. Don’t believe me? then try the following

• www.example.com/
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.php
• example.com/index.php

There are others, and the issue is discussed by a Google engineer recently. Whatever you do, don’t say ‘duplicate content penalty’, it’s just not like that.

So WHY is this an issue?

Vital Google juice, link equity, or authority in other words, that is bestowed by people linking to your pages, well, it’s reduced if they’re linking to different copies of the same page. You most definitely want all the links you can get ‘adding up’ on a single page.

It helps you rank better, and whilst issues might often be overstated on their own, the value of a listing on the first page of Google can be exponentially more valuable than one on their second page.

Fix small problems first and the big ones get easier!

Worst of all is that this issue can affect your website stats. People ending up on different versions of your pages will show up in different rows on your reports. Think of the horror, how could you possibly endure incorrect stats? I know I couldn’t – but how on earth could we make the right decisions?

At this point I could get technical and talk about server based 301 redirects, which solve the problem, but maybe that’s another post, or maybe you could ‘google’ that and see what comes up.

Also, here is a link to help… A great .htaccess 301 redirect generating tool - remember, back up often!

That website has both the www and non www version of their website pages up and running….now that’s funny, in a vaguely, inversely proportional, way.