Bonehead SEO » SEO Questions

Fixing the Duplicate Content Issue

Kristine — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:04:01 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

Recently Google announced that they now have a format that you can use within your web pages that allow you to specify which URL you prefer to use for your web pages. This helps to alleviate the duplicate content issue that many site owners and SEOs have been dealing with for years.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say that someone linked to one of your pages using the following URL:

http://www.SomeSite.com/cart.php?item=someitem

But this same item on your site could also be accessed by the following URL as well:

http://www.SomeSite.com/cart.php?item=someitem&category=somecategory

Since both pages contain almost identical information, search engines may consider this duplicate content.

Now, all you need to do is add a line of code within the “” section of your web pages code to specify which URL you prefer your site to use.

Here’s what the code would look like:

This tells Google (as well as Yahoo and Microsoft) the preferred way you want this URL to appear.

Why this is so important is because it will help to make sure that things such as link popularity all are pointing to the page you want them to.

Keep in mind that this code should only be used for pages that are either absolutely identical or so similar to one another that it would cause a duplicate content issue for your site.

Within their post, Google answers a lot of questions about this format but probably the most important answers are:

The rel=”canonical” code above CAN be a redirect.
It CANNOT be used to link to a completely different domain.
This standard can be used by any search engine when they crawl and index your site.

So now that you know how to use it for your website, what about your blog?

Luckily, there’s already been a new plugin developed just for this purpose which you can get here.

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UPDATE

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Google engineer Matt Cutts has created a 20-minute video on the canonical link element. I highly suggest that you watch this video in order to get a great grasp on what the canonical link element is.

How do you get those extra links in Google?

Kristine — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:27:01 +0000

A question was submitted to me just today about those extra links that tend to show up in a Google Search Results page.

The Question:
Hello,
I have a burning question and I can’t find an answer in SEO course available.
If you do this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kurir&btnG=Search

You’ll notice the first result has 8 other links besides the main one (Crna hronika, sport etc.). That must increase the CTR a lot.

The question is: what makes Google do that for one site and not for another one?
What should you do with your site to get such extra links in the results?

Best Regards,
Eko

Here’s an example of what they look like:

These are called “Site Links” and the bottom line is that Google does not tell you exactly how to get these sitelinks for your own site.

However, each website that contains these sitelinks has a few common denominators:

They’re typically an authority site.
They have an easy-to-navigate hierarchical structure. In the case above, there is a section for “Sports”, a section for “Stars” and a section for “Politics” as Eko pointed out.
They have lots of incoming one-way links from a variety of sources.
The sites are easy to navigate.
The age of the site tends to be a defining factor.

If we pick apart the site above, there’s a few things to note about it:

The site has a PageRank of 6.
It has over over 100,000 links pointing to the site itself including internal pages.
Sites such as these generally have been around for years.
The site has lots of useful information that readers enjoy by clicking through to various pages.

You’ll generally find these sitelinks on major news sites like CNN and highly visited sites such as Oprah’s site at Oprah.com.

So while these sitelinks can be a huge boost for your search engine traffic, they aren’t easy to come by. Google must deem your site “worthy” enough to receive these sitelinks.

If you use Google Webmaster tools, at http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools/ and you’ve added your site, you’ll be able to navigate to the section where Google tells you whether or not any sitelinks have been identified on your site as candidates for the Google Search Results page.

The bottom line is that there is no hard and fast rule to getting sitelinks placed on your site aside from some of the factors that are believed to be important as mentioned above.

If you’d like more information about sitelinks, visit:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Kristine

PodCast

Kristine — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:50:30 +0000

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Your SEO Questions Answered

Kristine — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:43:28 +0000