Fix duplicate content in the search engine index with the canonical element.
Let The Search Guru show you how to use the canonical element to fix duplicate content and search engine index issues.
Here at The Search Guru blog we’ve posted previous entries discussing canonical issues and how they can cause duplicate content in the search engine index. To refresh your memory, canonicalization is the process of the search engines having to choose the best URL to index when there are several choices. To a search engine, http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com look like two different sites that have exactly the same content, which can trigger the Google duplicate content filter.
One way to address this is by implementing a 301 redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred version of a URL. We show you how to do this on a Unix/Apache server and a Windows server.
Use the canonical element as well to fix Google duplicate content.
The canonical element was introduced by Google about a year ago, but you may not yet realize its power. The canonical element (also referred to as the canonical tag, although it is technically not a tag) shows Google which version of a URL to include in the search engine index.
The canonical element goes in the <head> section of the page and tells Google the preferred URL of the page. The element looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/"/>
Remove duplicate content with the power of the canonical element.
Recently a client’s site contained articles that were accessible through multiple URLs on the site. They wanted to keep this user-friendly feature, but multiple copies of the articles were in the search engine index.
The solution? Determining which URL would be the “main” URL of the article and adding the canonical element to the main and secondary URLs. For instance, http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-to-article was decided to be the main URL. http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-tos/how-to-article was a secondary URL. The canonical element
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-to-article"/> was added to both pages to indicate which one should be indexed. Neat, huh?
Keep similar pages out of the search engine index and avoid Google duplicate content.
Duplicate content can really wreak havoc on retail sites, when product pages can be very similar to one another with the same copy and product specs. The only difference in the content may be a size or color. By adding the canonical element to product pages, you can effectively keep Google from indexing similar pages on your site – and keep from getting penalized!
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