This week our guest posts focus on the latest trends in SEO.

Today: Duplicate content by Derek Mabie. 

Duplicate content is every webmaster’s nightmare.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: A portion of text that exists on multiple URLs, making it difficult for search engines to determine how to rank them in order of importance.

Google will ultimately choose one URL to show in the results page – but it may not be the page you want to be exposed.

The bigger issue, though, is Google may prematurely give up on crawling your site if it keeps encountering instances of duplicate content. No one likes doing the same job multiple times, and Google is no exception. (more…)