rel="canonical"

Content Duplication and Prevention

Unlike in newspapers industry where content is quickly being devalued, if you are running an online business your content could be much more than just a text. Content, once a king, always a king and if properly used, your site content could help you gain large amount of audience.

Search engine providers such as Google pay high attention to site content and they will rank your page value accordingly which means that you must re-visit your pages, take the clog out and update anything that has been missing or anything else that might be preventing you get better search engine ranking.

If you are running WordPress site or a blog the control over the content will be much easier, however at the same time you could be at higher risk getting “de-ranked” because of your content.

How can you help yourself?

One of the largest worries before Google, Yahoo and Bing was taking rel=”canonical” into consideration was duplicated content. According to Google rel=”canonical” is a hint, it means that if your site holds the same content on other pages (i.e. WordPress: Categories, Tags) it will not be considered as duplicated content. Many site owners make tremendously bad decisions when it comes to content duplications while rel=”canonical” is in use. If you want to work with this, the proper and the only way don’t add “noindex” rule to the pages with the same content as your main page.

Let’s say that you have example.com/example-article as your original source and the same content under example.com/category/example-article, if you use rel=”canonical” Google will “automatically” classify both pages differently, the original page will be the one with authority and copied version will be just that, but if you add “noindex” and told Google crawlers directly from that page or if they are disallowed via robots.txt, this will only confuse the robots because they will not be able to find your duplicate content when rel=”canonical” was provided.

rel=”canonical” may not be as easy to implement if you are running under difficult content management system, however if you are using WordPress platform your job more than 90% done, all you have to do is to get a plugin and you are all ready to go. Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Pack is the WordPress plugin that is highly recommended by WordPress users, as well as anywhere in SEO world.

Canon is the “rule”, follow that rule. Your site will perform and rank much better.

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