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Printer-Friendly Page Duplication

Printer-Friendly Page Duplication

Contents:

 

Duplicate Content & Canonicalization – Printer-Friendly Page Duplication

Often website admins will produce printer friendly versions of content to assist users in printing the content available on a site. This may mean that there are PDF versions or duplicate versions in a printer friendly format present on site. Google can read PDF documents and will rank them organically within the SERPs, the same is true for printer friendly content.

In order to resolve this, a canonical tag will need to be placed in the source code of the printer friendly version of the content. (See above section canonical tags).

This article is one of several that fall under the duplicate content and canonicalization series in the Raptor Knowledge Base. Please the below list for all other articles covering all of the different types of duplicate content and canonicalization issues that a website can experience below:

Printer-Friendly Page Duplication

This is slightly different to the average canonical duplication issue, as the content is not just accessible from multiple URLs, it has actually been added to multiple pages with different URLs.

Impact of Issue

Printer friendly versions of content are still indexable by Google as a default, but you do not want this to be the version preferred by Google or shown in their SERPs.

Duplicate Content

When a web page is accessible from more than one URL, Google may choose to serve either one in the search results unless you specify which to serve. Duplicate content can be devalued by Google and other search engines, which can result in a loss of rankings, ­­ and consequently traffic for terms targeted on those pages.

Hence if a webpage is accessible from both example.com/index and example.com, this could have a negative impact on your website’s content. It can also cause confusion and result in Google changing which of these URLs it shows.

How to Resolve

There are a number of steps that can be taken to ensure that this does not become an issue on your site.

Canonical Tags

This is a topic mentioned in greater detail in another article specific to canonical tags but for the purpose of this article, adding a canonical tag to every page of the site (following the guide above) will prevent most duplicate content issues on any site.

Raptor Tools!

Use Raptor’s SEO tools to analyse your site to determine if there are any printer friendly duplication issues. Our SEO auditing and web crawler software can easily and quickly identify printer friendly duplication issues.

Benefit of Resolving

Prevent Google and other Search Engines from indexing and displaying the incorrect pages of your site in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Controlling the URL’s from which your site & pages can be accessed prevents the potential impact from duplicate content issues.