Yesterday, Feb 12 2009, the big 3 announced the adoption of a new relationship attribute for the header link tag in order to specify a preferred version of a page where there may be different ways to access it and to help avoid issues with duplicate content. It's nice to have an option for when you take over a badly built site where there isn't a budget to rewrite a lot of code and do a million 301 redirects but this is just a band-aid on a larger problem.
This is why architecture of a project is important and if you build it right the first time, you don't have to worry about this being an issue. There are always times however that a bot will surprise you with some weird entry URL so as a guideline, it's good to monitor your analytics and do simple 301 rewrites as they happen, if they happen. Also just for kicks, there's already a WordPress plugin from Joost de Valk (thanks man) to handle it on your blog, and an extension for Magento too!
Read More:
- Google, Specify Your Cononical
- Yahoo, Fighting Duplication
- Live, Partnering to Solve Duplicate Content issues
- SEOmoz has a really detailed write-up too
December 2009 Update:
Wordpress 2.9 is adding this function into core so no more plugins will be needed to accomplish this if you're running wordpress.
Posted 13th Feb 2009 in seo
Tags: BIRTFT, cononical, magento, seo, wordpress
rYnoweb.com is the blog of web architect, seo and consultant, Chuck Reynolds. The articles on this site try to focus on web development, design, security and my life in general on the internet.
It's really just way to get webmasters to shut up with all the questions they get about duplicate content. But yes, it's now going to be a 'best practice' and one people should definitely follow.