Home Search Engines, etc. Duplicate Content and Google

Duplicate Content and Google PDF Print E-mail
Wednesday, 30 March 2011 18:25
Duplicate content has long been a concern for webmasters due to the Google and other search engines penalizing a site showing duplicate content. I know it is often a problem when doing the SEO on a site when a particular page can be reached via various URLs, and htaccess must be adjusted to make sure that only one URL is seen.

I recently came across this page, however, under the Google Webmaster Guidelines, wherein Google states that you can specify the preferred version of a URL. If a page can be reached by several different URLs as in the examples on that page, one can put a LINK attribute in the header of the page to let Google know which URL is the preferred one, like so:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish">

This code is, of course, placed in the <head> section of the webpage in question.

Obviously, duplicate content on different pages is still an issue and should not be used if one wants to keep a site in the good graces of the search engines.
 
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