Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
Years ago when I was starting out as an Seo I was faced with a really annoying problem “duplicate content “ this is particularly common with online shops or product based sites as they can display 2 or 3 different types of url’s with the same content. There has never been anything solid to prove that duplicate content will hurt your overall rankings but it will confuse search engines in what pages should be the authority choice for indexing
Here’s a example :
www.shopcheaper.com/sony-plasma-xt500.html
www.shopcheap.com/sony-plasam-xt500.html/client-id?23908
The above example shows the same page in different Url formats , so what’s the solution? Well Google, Yahoo and MSN have just introduced a new tag called the Canonical URL Tag , actually Google came up with it and the rest of the Digi tribes followed .
How does little tag wonder work
The tag is placed between the header tags in a html page or in a header file for template based websites. Its another way of adding 301 type or redirect to duplicate pages.
It will look something like this
<head><link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.seoclient.org”></head>
It’s a good fix in my opinion but will it address the duplication of full sites ? While I was at SES London I sat in on a session addressing duplicate content one of the speakers Matt Paines, MD, XSEO spoke about duplicate domain issues.
Long story short
If I have seoclient.org and www.seoclient.org and also the IP of my website they can all be indexed by spiders and seen as duplicate content. The best way to address this issue is to add a 301 in your .htaccess file and redirect both the non www. And IP address to your main site www.mysite.com. Its an important measure to take as others linking to your site might not link correctly and automatically link using the non www version of your site.
Hope this helps
Neil
5ubliminal
You might find use for this plugin: Canonical URL Wordpress Plugin.
Posted 3-26-2009