Think about it, if you had 10 websites and had to write content for those 10 websites, this could get a little tedious. Especially if one of the sites could overlap with another one.  For example, a site about Affiliate Marketing and one about Search Engine Optimization.

In many cases, webmasters used shortcuts to lessen their load and would use the same content on both of these sites.  Not only that, with the popularity of article marketing, now not nearly as prevalent as it used to be, these same website owners needed to get their articles syndicated and what better way, then to use content they already wrote right?

What happened along the way however, was something called a duplicate content issue.  This meant that the search engines were finding duplicate, or at least incredibly similar content across a wide variety of sites.  They had to keep their users happiness in mind and make sure that they were delivering relevant content.  So adjustments were made, some sites were penalized for having this duplicate content, while others seemed to rise above the fray.

Aside from these two issues; using the same content on sites owned by the same person and submitting the same article to article directories, there was also a third culprit which is called scraped content.  This is essentially those programs that promise you that all you need to do is install a blog, and they’ll do the rest (for a fee).  Generally this “rest” that they would do would be to take content already available across the Internet, add it to your blog and viola! you had instant content.  Not exactly a great idea.

And while written content is the major culprit here, duplicate content isn’t just contained to articles.  It can be in the form of something as similar as the structure of a website.  Yep, if your website setup looked a lot like another site’s content, this too could be considered duplicate content.

Now, you might think you’re out of the woods if you’ve never done any of these things, if you only own one website for example, if you’ve never syndicated articles, or never touched a program that published stuff for you, etc., but you might not know that even if you only own just one website, the content on your site might actually be considered duplicate.  Why?

This often occurs when a site owner hasn’t structured their site properly using the canonical link element.  As a matter of fact, in case you weren’t aware, Google considers the following sites completely different from one another:  

• http://Somesite.com
• http://www.Somesite.com
• http://Somesite.com/
• http://www.Somesite.com/

Yes, they all go to “Somesite.com” but as far as Google is concerned, these are all separate websites and if you’re canonical isn’t set up correctly you could have been penalized and not even know it.

Google helped website owners make huge strides when it introduced this canonical link element.  Without this, Google may think that you’re publishing the same exact content on multiple different websites.

But there are other ways too that you can be sure you aren’t falling into this trap.  One of the most recent pieces of help that Google has given to us is something that you’ll find within Google’s Webmaster Tools. In the event that you haven’t yet added a canonical link element to your web pages but you HAVE set up a Google Webmaster Tools account, Google will now notify you if it detects duplicate content.

In addition to this simple change however, there are other things that you can do as well to avoid it all together.

The easiest one to avoid is using articles that other people have written on your site as content.  While it might seem really easy to do (and it is), Google will likely have already located the original document and your site will be considered the “duplicate”.  Which further means that you likely won’t show up in the search engines for the keyword you want.

Another big issue that comes into play is when you’re moving your own website.  If you do decide to move an existing site to a new domain, it’s incredibly important that you use a 301 redirect.  This will help the search engines understand that you are permanently moving the data from one site to another.

Lastly, to make absolutely certain that your content is attributed to you and no one else, use the rel=author attribute on your articles.  This way, Google will know that you were the original author of the content and in the event that someone else uses your content without your permission, then Google will know it was you who originally wrote the content in the first place.

As Quick Online Tips found out, the new update to this plugin, version 1.4.9 now adds the canonical link element (also referred to as the canonical link tag).  But, it might not work the way you would expect it to.

Here’s what was discovered:

We host our WordPress blog in a subdirectory called “Archives”. Its easy tohost WordPress in an alternative directory. So the canonical url of the front page should be

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quickonlinetips.com/" />

while the hosted blog archives page should be

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/" />

But when I looked into the source code of the main page and the archives page, both show this

which basically means that when search engines visitquickonlinetips.com, the canonical url tells them / redirects them with information that the actual page of choice which we want to index  isquickonlinetips.com/archives/and that creates a whole lot of confusion in the search engines.

What they discovered was that the All in One SEO plugin was taking what it felt was the right canonical link tag and assigning it to pages as it saw fit and which at first glance, seems logical.  However, what this did for Quick Online Tips (as well as many other sites I would imagine), was erronously assign the wrong URL.

Just to double check this information, I updated this same plugin on one of my other sites, http://KristineWirth.com just to see how the new update to the All in One SEO Plugin worked.

I currently have my URLs set to the non-www version for this site.

When updating the plugin I noticed that the canonical link element updated to http://KristineWirth.com/ (notice the ending slash).  This URL (with the ending slash) is considered a completely separate URL in the eyes of Google.

So with the new canonical link element added to this plugin, it was telling Google to index my pages with the slash rather than without which could end up hurting my rankings.  (And yours as well).

You can read the earlier post on BoneheadSEO about the canonical link element as well as watch Google’s Matt Cutts explain how it works in a 20-minute long video.

One way to alert Google of the preferred way of indexing the URLs of your site is to add your site to Google’s Webmaster Tools (if you haven’t done so already and under the “Settings” link on the left choose the preferred domain for your site.)  This will tell Google which URL you prefer for your website.

Additionally, Google will also make reference to your sitemap file.  When you add your sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools it will also use this as a reference point.  So if your sitemap file points to http://www.BoneheadSEO.com for example, then Google will know that your preferred URL is with the “www”.

Within the Bonehead SEO Course, I explain how to set up this XML file the right way.

So, if you’re currently using the All in One SEO Plugin on your WordPress blog, and either have or intend on updating it to the new version, I would suggest that after you update the plugin, you go into the settings of the plugin and uncheck the “Canonical URLs” box.

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 “<head>” 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:

1. The rel=”canonical” code above CAN be a redirect.
2. It CANNOT be used to link to a completely different domain.
3. 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.