This tutorial will show you how to avoid duplicate content issues. Remember that if you don’t have duplicate content issues on your website you’ll increase pagerank, you get more pages indexed and Google will like your website more!
Before I start:
- Don’t give much of a crap about this if you’re just starting out and maybe have little time and/or money – it’s best to do what’s going to really skyrocket your rankings (like link building).
- This is not for everyone – it’s mainly for those who have an E commerce or a membership site (see below for more details).
I suggest you tell a programmer to do this fix for you, or create a script that will automatically add the code for you. Be creative and tell your programmer what you need – they can do practically anything.
E commerce sites have lots of identical pages because they don’t just use .html in all pages, or .htm or .php. They make use of php, tracking ID’s and that kind of thing that I personally don’t like to talk much about. For me Techno Music is much better than Techno Talk.
Here’s an example, your website might have these two pages:
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dog-food&category=dogs
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dog-food&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678
Both show identical content – those long URL’s are created on E commerce websites mainly, you will not find them on your website probably (as long as you don’t have an E commerce site) – they basically create duplicate content and that long code is used to track and so forth.
So what do you do?
Again I suggest you tell a programmer to make this fix – not because it’s super difficult but because it will be done better and easier AND you won’t have to mess with any of this yourself.
You can’t communicate with search engines verbally, like putting an audio message and saying:
“Hey Google there’s a link on this page and you should ignore it”.
You communicate with “text messages”!
So here we’re going to put a “TEXT MESSAGE” on the page which is identical to the other to tell Google that this page is a duplicate of another one.
Here’s the message:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dog-food&category=dogs” />
Put that in the <head> section of the identical page – in this case in the page which has the tracking code in it. This one:
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=dog-food&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678
This text message is telling Google:
“Hey this page is a duplicate of this one: (the url you put in the message) and you should give credit and all the SEO love to that one.”
You can give this tutorial to a programmer and they’ll do the fixes and understanding for you. I do want you to take action EVEN if you can’t understand maybe – don’t say: I can’t understand this well enough… you don’t really have to. There are programmers who when it comes to codes and php and these kind of things they’ll just make 1 + 1 and fix the thing easily.
I do believe when doing SEO you need to hire a programmer sometimes – this is one of those cases, because this is technical.
Got it?
You might have more than just 2 pages identical, there could be 3 or 4 pages that are all identical – even though that’s rare but in any case you just put the “TEXT MESSAGE” on all identical pages to tell Google which one of these you prefer!
If you have no clue whether you need to use this canonical tag ask a programmer or yourself these questions:
Are you using static pages? This means is your website made of pages that end with .html, .htm or .php and without session or tracking id’s and that kind of code… If yes yours are called static pages and you don’t have to mess with this Canonical tag. Just put the tag in a canon and give it a shot.
Most websites don’t need to mess with Canonical Tag. Most websites have static pages, but if you have a membership type of website or E commerce there’s a possibility you find this tag useful to avoid duplicate content issues created by the php code and that kind of technical freak.
That it! Google won’t give any pagerank to the duplicate pages – instead they are given to the other pages, in example above to Page A.
Thanks
Tags: Canonical Tag, OnPage Optimization
