Canonical: Another way to Beat Duplicate Content Filters
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
Earlier in the week I showed you how to use your robots.txt file to keep Google from spidering parts of your site. And while that works, it may not be feasible for everyone depending on the specific architecture of your web site.
For instance, you may have a shopping cart type reference with strange URL’s that can show duplicate content. For example:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?product#8384sj&reference=green&storelocator=2
All that gobbledegook at the end of the URL is sort of common to shopping cart type sites (relative paths), and affiliate sites as well.
That same page above might also be located at http://www.yoursite.com/dolls for instance.
In a case like that it isn’t remotely feasible to use a robots.txt file for all your products…so what do you do?
Use the “rel=canonical” tag.
What is it? It’s a little tag that goes between your <head> and </head> tag on each duplicate content page of your web site. It tells the search engines that the stuff on this specific page may exist in more than one place on your site, but that they (the search engines) should only credit it to the link in the rel=canonical tag.
That may be a bit confusing…actually, I’m getting confused just writing about it!
Let’s do it this way….suppose in our example above, your main doll page is http://www.yoursite.com/dolls and THAT’s the one that you want to show up at the search engines, not your duplicate shopping cart page located at http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?product#8384sj&reference=green&storelocator=2
So on all the duplicate shopping cart pages you would put this exact tag:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/doll”>
And that goes between your <head> and </head> tag.
And its just that simple! If you’re running a wordpress blog, the all-in-one seo pack will create canonical URL’s automatically which should help you fight duplicate content filters for your blog.
What does Google think of the tag? Well, they view it as a hint, not a directive….but a strong hint. Also they don’t mind if the two pages are slightly different as long as they are basically the same page.
One thing to note, you should not point a rel=canonical link to an URL on another web site. It should only be used to direct the search engines around the same web site domain.
All major search engines now support this tag, but you can read what Google has to say at their blog here.
What do you think? Comment below.
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
