MSN has a new in-house SEO. Derrick Wheeler’s been on the job just a couple of months and calls himself their “Senior SEO Architect”. 

Derrick recently spoke at PubCon 2007 in Las Vegas where he immediately warmed the audience up, which is somewhat unusual for an MSNer. He may prove to be the kind of spokesman and personality that Google has in Matt Cutts.

Here’s what Derrick Wheeler had to say about duplicate content:

Why Duplicate Content is Undesirable

• Allowing duplicate pages into the index pushes out other good content that deserves to be there.

• Duplicate content in the index gives a bad search experience.

• The Search Engines waste time and resources crawling and indexing duplicate content.

MSN eliminates duplicate content whenever it is detected.

• As soon as it thinks it’s are being served duplicate content, it may stop crawling your site.

• When MSN is indexing and find lots of duplicate content, it may stop indexing.

• When in the ranking process, it detects duplicate content, it may discontinue ranking it.

What should you do?

• Identify duplicate content on your own site by regularly crawling it and seeing what you find.

• Detect the Search Engines coming to your site and strip out session ID s for them.