Content Duplication
Content duplication is among the most talked about subjects in SEO. With the advances we have seen in search engine algorithms, the challenge of content duplication is no longer as big as it used to be. Duplicate content can occur for many different reasons. Some common causes include affiliate sites, printer-friendly pages, multiple site URLs to the same content, and session and other URL variables. This section talks about different ways to deal with content duplication.
Canonical Link Element
Content duplication is one of the most common challenges webmasters face. Although you can deal with content duplication in many different ways, the introduction of the canonical link element is being touted as one of the resolutions to this issue. As of early 2009, the canonical link element was officially endorsed by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Microsoft’s blog site (http://bit.ly/lIVY0) stated that:
Live Search (Bing) has partnered with Google and Yahoo to support a new tag attribute that will help webmasters identify the single authoritative (or canonical) URL for a given page.
Ask.com has also endorsed the canonical link element. Needless to say, many popular CMSs and blogging software packages scrambled to produce updated versions of their code or plug-ins to support canonical URLs. These include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and many others.
What is a canonical link?
A canonical link is like a preferred link. This preference comes to light when we are dealing with duplicate ...
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