A friend of ours Mike Mcdonald pinged me today about a recent video done with Matt Cutts from Google. The topic was duplicate content and how on larger sites, ecommerce sites and resource/education sites, duplicate content can be a major concern and to help internet marketers and SEO’s combat this filter and growing issue.A bout of social media in the morning along with coffee always seems to make our day around this office. I was personally pinged by mike mcdonald over at Web Pro News through stumbleupon and I was very excited to see this news. It has been an ongoing battle - duplicate content vs. the SEO’s and webmasters. Us SEO’s seemed to have it down right? Just make sure your link content has more backlinks then the people who steal it right. That was the thin red line that removed filters and applied them. Pretty archaic right?
Yes, I think it is and that is exactly why I think this new tag is so great. Now think of content navigation or pages that have the same paragraph on several pages but unique content down below, now there is a way to tell google the parent page where this content originated. Simply insert this in your pages head section:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />
According to web pro world the 3 major search engines have combined forces to recognize this tag to help reduce duplicate content errors on the web.
Although I think its a great idea I still think that utilizing links to the original document will be more powerful as with many link building tactics you do have control over this. However pages that you do have the ability to edit and ad this tag I would absolutly recommend it and it will now be something we do for all of our clients to ensure they are getting the most up to date and cutting edge marketing services performed on their site.
What are your thoughts on this new tag? Is it a bit like the sitemaps protocol that was issued for all robots.txt files? How many people besides us are really using that on a daily basis? Will seo’s pick this up and use it? Do you feel this new code will benefit your clients?