When you link from one page to a duplicate page.....

Question

Hello guys,

Another background concept we talk about is the notion of wasted link juice. I am going to use the term PageRank, but more generically I really mean link juice, which might relate to concepts like trust and authority beyond the original PageRank concept.

When you link from one page to a duplicate page, you are squandering some of your PageRank, correct?

Please give me your feedback............

Answer 1

It can work out that way. Typically, duplicate content is not the largest factor on how many pages will be crawled, but it can be a factor. My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the site architecture upfront, because then you don't have to worry as much about duplicate content issues and all the corresponding things that come along with it. You can often use 301 Redirects for duplicate URLs to merge those together into one single URL. If you are not able to do a 301 Redirect, then you can fall back on rel=canonical.

Some people can't get access to their web server to generate a 301, maybe they are on a school account, a free host, or something like that. But if they are able to fix it in the site architecture, that's preferable to patching it up afterwards with a 301 or a rel=canonical.