If your website has similar or identical content accessible through multiple URLs, this is very likely to be categorised as duplicate content. To avoid being penalised by search engines for this and to clear up all duplicate sites – a new open standard was announced by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in February 2009. Now, by adding a simple piece of code on to your preferred URL and duplicate content URLs, you can let search engines know the preferred URL that the duplicate content refers to. This also allows other URL properties such as PageRank to be transferred as well.
Once this code is included in all relevant websites, search engines will use this to calculate the most relevant page to be displayed. This gives the webmaster more control over the search listing and enables site canonisation.
With this new standard coming in, various plug-ins for WordPress and E-Commerce websites are also available.
For more information on how to specify your canonical URL, please visit Google Webmaster Blog .
About the author: Gerard Harris
SEO Manager – Gerard HarrisGerard is the SEO Manager of one of 4Ps Marketing’s search engine optimisation teams. He manages a team of 4 and a portfolio of 15 SEO clients. His day to day work involves managing client relationships to make sure they are getting the best ranking positions in search engines, leading to increases in relevant traffic to client websites.