Overcoming duplicate content issues with flat HTML

Had lots of PHP pages dropped by google!

[stella_kl]

I have recently had a tonne of PHP? pages dropped probably because of duplicate content.

Do people think that if you create flat HTML files with very different file names, title, H1, H2, H3 and opening two paragraphs you might get away with it? This is assuming the rest of the page has similar content to others.

Is there a tool to see how dupe your content is?

[Lorel]

If you are using session IDS in php they can confuse a search engine bot and cause it to record more than one copy of your pages. So turn session IDs off or at least the ones designed to track traffic.

I recently redesigned a website that was written in .asp which wasn't ranking anywhere and changed all file names to html as well as increasing the keywords and optimizing the text on the page.

I set up a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages in htaccess and Google had all the new pages indexed within two weeks. That site has only been online for a little over a month and already keyword rank is steadily climbing and ranking on first page for some terms.

However, doing this may not cure your Duplication penalty. First you need to decide if it's because of the PHP script or do you actually have duplicate content somewhere.