Over the last few days i have been reading my mind dumb about SEO techniques. En specially how to eliminate duplicate content. For the main part this is all clear. And we succeed in implementing most SEO techniques without problems. One question however remains. Even after reading through Matt Cutts complete website

So maybe some bright mind could shed a light on the following situation.

We have two domains for example a.nl and a.be. Two separate domains that point to the same website. Just because people in Belgium would probably feel more confident buying something from a local website then one based in an other country. But the content under both domains is identical. The reason behind this is. In Belgium (.be) and The Netherlands (.nl) people speak Dutch. So there’s not really an option in providing content in a different language.

Now the question does Google or any other search engine see this as duplicate content? And if yes what can be done about it. My thought was to add 301 responses to the .be site and do everything over the .nl site. But this would render .be useless in my opinion.

I’m doing some SEO optimization for a couple of websites. And one of the small steps is to force a trailing slash on all URL’s that do not point to a file on the server. The reason I’m doing this is to go around the duplicate content problem.

/trip/80
/trip/80/

Both point to the same content. But a crawler would see this as two different URL’s. Which off course is correct. But this can lead to duplicate content being indexed in search engines. Which could result in penalties for the site in question. So to fix this problem we add three simple lines to the main .htaccess file

# If a requested file does not exists
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

# If a requested directory does not exist
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# Force a trailing slash to the request
RewriteRule [^/]$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]