Search Marketing Blog
New Canonicalization Tag: Fixing Duplicate Content Once and For All
Posted by Tyson Braun on 02.25.2009
No matter what your level of experience, there is one element of search engine optimization that is guaranteed to cause you problems: the spelling and pronouncing of the word ‘Canonicalization’! I have found that utilizing the grade school trick of breaking-up the word into separate sections (i.e., ‘canon’ ‘I’ ‘calization’), helps to get the spelling right, and memorizing the phonetics of the word (which is: ka-NOH-nihk-uhl-LIE-ZAY-shun), gets me close to the proper punctuation. (Good Luck!)
Much easier, however, is actually learning the best practices for the SEO canonicalzing (a form of the word I have now officially created!) of Web pages, and why it is critically important to the process of achieving prominently positioned Natural search listings. But, even this can be challenging. Because of this, I have outlined below the necessity of proper canonicalization, and the new advice that came out this month from the three leading search engines on how to correct improper canonical structure.
That Big Word Defined
Canonicalization refers to the process consolidating all versions of a Web page under one URL, and selecting the most appropriate URL to ensure that an issue of duplicate content does not exist. If search engines view a page as being published at many separate URLs, they may rank those pages lower than they would otherwise, or not rank them at all.
The Problem with Duplicate Content
As most of us know, there is a log of junk on the Internet. One of the reasons why, is that pages with the same (or very similar) content are allowed to be indexed in the search engines. This happens because there are several ways to express a URL (www, non-www, /index, etc.), and Web masters may not realize this is a big problem for their SEO goals. As a result, the search bots treat these pages as unique and index two separate pages. This is bad for a few reasons:
- The authority from external links is divided among these pages
- The search bots’ valuable time on your domain is squandered on indexing duplicate content, rather than reaching unique pages
- Long URLs look ugly, diminishing click-through-rates
Fixing Duplicate Content the Old Fashioned Way
One of the first steps we employ with each new client’s SEO campaign is to address canonicalization. If we encounter canonical challenges, the solution is to implement ‘301 redirects’ for the additional pages, so that they all point to one appropriate domain. There are a few other SEO tactics to avoid canonicalization confusion for search bots:
- Submit a Sitemap with only one form structure of the URLs (only with ‘www’ for example)
- Configure the CMS to only generate one structure of the URLs
- Set a preference in Google Web Master Tools for preferred URL structure
- Instruct the search bots in the robots.txt file to only index the preferred URL
New Canonicalization Tag
None of the above methods are ideal. Many Web masters do not have access to make these changes, and even if they did, it may not work as desired anyway. This is why the three leading Search Engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, are now each recognizing the new ‘canonicalization tag’ that can easily be coded into a site’s HTML. The tag directs search bots to index the preferred URL once and for all! To be placed inside the <Head> Tag of pages to not be indexed:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”www.exampledomain.com/prettyURL” />
Web site owners and SEO consultants now have a simple and powerful method to clean up duplicate content on the Internet and realize their site’s SEO goals. Also, since the task of canonicalizing Web sites has been greatly eased, we no longer have to struggle with speaking or writing this challenging SEO tongue twister!
