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.
