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Duplicate Content Killed by Cononical Tag

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Duplicate Content Problem Solved?

It has long been the bane of today’s internet that is absolutely inundated, even polluted with duplicate content. For many of us, business owners and internet users alike, this excess of information clutters and confuses our searches, making some of us actually pull out the Yellow Pages. Really, the Yellow Pages. For quite some time now, many website owners have been threshing out a solution to this annoying problem.
Search engines have always tried their best to index and display the original or “canonical” version of a URL. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, copies and excerpts abound. One could never be sure if one was working with the original document. Up until now web masters worried that when search engines found multiple versions of requested pages, the link credibility of the web masters  would be diluted and they would lose rankings. Not ideal for anyone, really. We want our information uncensored; from the source. We demand our journalists site real sources, and we really hate wading through mountians of pages and pop-ups to find out why O.J. is back in jail.

Blessings upon us, only last week the major search engines announced that they have agreed upon a way to reduce duplicate content and make things easier for everyone. Like trademarking an invention, or signing a painting, original webpages will have the ability to claim their work. This solution… the new canonical tag!


Now a web masters can rest easier knowing that this tag will drastically reduce flagging for duplicate content.


Duplicate content comes in many different forms, one of the most popular being the use of multiple URLs pointing to the same page. This happens for lots of reasons. An online store may have various pages for multiple products sorted by different sizes, prices and so on. Another example could be a company’s affiliates using the codes at the end of the URL so they can track their own sales.


I always use “/?src=seoqueen” at the end of the URLs I’m linking to in order for the websites I’m linking to know I passed them a link. So now my website that had only 50 pages could now have 10 different URLs pointing to those pages I linked to; causing the search engine spiders to index 500 pages!


This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.


  • The spiders may crawl less of your pages. Because the spiders only use a limited amount of bandwidth the crawler may only be able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a visit. It would be ideal to have the spiders visit 100 unique pages, not 5 pages 5 times each.
  • Every link passes a percent of link juice to a page. If you have 10 different links that point to a page the link juice being passed to that page is now diluted. You want each of your pages to get full link credit so if a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

    • So how do we use the new canonical tag?


    You simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version of the url:
    <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dog-collars” />


    inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:


    http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dogcollars-dog&category=designercollars
    http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dogcollars&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678


    and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dog-collars. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.


    Good luck and have fun adding the new canonical tag to your pages.


    Posted by group5 on Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 8:36 pm 
    Filed under SEO · Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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