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Avoid Duplicate Content by Using the Canonical Link Element

I wanted to share a great video by Matt Cutts that is posted on the GoogleWebmasterHelp YouTube channel.

The canonical link element is lack of a better word a new “meta tag” that will help you avoid duplicate content on your site.

This video addresses the solution to the problem of having so many different URLs on your own site for the same page. One example he used is that Google sees all of these as different pages:

www.example.com

example.com

www.example.com/

example.com/

www.example.com/index.html

example.com/index.html

www.example.com/home.asp

example.com/home.asp

It’s almost certain that these pages all have the exact same content. As you can imagine if these are “viewed” by Google as different pages they will produce duplicate content on your site.

This is especially confusing when your backlinks point to a combination of these 8 different URLs instead of just one of them. The best way to head this off is to fix these problems before they arise. Matt says we need to “standardize” or “normalize” our URLs from the start so that there’s only one way to get to your content. One way to do this is by getting into the habit of choosing one URL and using it for all of your backlinks and for all of your internal linking (you should also always choose absolute URLs instead of relative URLs).

You will also want to go into your Google Webmaster Tools and set this chosen URL your preferred domain or preferred URL.

Google also considers the URLs submitted in the sitemap you submit. If they see one URL submitted that’s on the sitemap and one that’s not they will “prefer” the URL on the sitemap.

You can use a permanent 301 redirect for each of the other versions of the URL to the preferred URL. But there are instances where you don’t have access to do so (i.e. free hosting or anywhere you don’t run the web server, and of course you can’t help how other people link to you).

This video addresses some other issues that you’ll want to be aware of and it also give you the code you’ll want to use to for your canonical link elements and tells you where to place the code.

So check it out and leave your comments below. Have you ever heard of the canonical link element? Do you think you might have some duplicate content issues? Let us hear from you in the comments section. *SmiLes* Suzanne

P.S. A special note in the video for WordPress bloggers … he mentioned there will most likely be some new plugins to address this or possibly even have it written in to the next WP update version.

VIDEO - Avoid Duplicate Content by Using the Canonical Link Element (If you’re reading this via RSS Feed come on over and view this great video)