Duplicate content have always been an obstacles for webmasters while going for search engine optimization. Many of the webmasters got their site penalized by the search engines for using duplicate content in their website. The main case of duplicate content arises when multiple URLs on the same domain pointed to the same content. This issue mainly arises in dynamic and CMS driven sites and the webmasters really live with the fear of being penalized by the search engines. The case arises when more than a single URL on the same website points to the same content under certain conditions. Consider pages in a CMS driven web site http://www.yoursite.com/products.php?item=woodchairs&category=chairs and http://www.yoursite.com/product.php?item=woodchairs&trackingid=3254&sessionid=7184 which points to the same content at http://www.yoursite.com/products.php?item=woodchairs
Here the first two URLs are pointing to the same content even though they have different URL parameters, which may cause duplicate content issue. There are mainly 2 ways to solve this issue. One is the Parameter Handling technique and the other is by using rel=”canonical” tag. By doing this the search engine would be able to understand this duplicate issue and the chances of being penalized are reduced, but not guaranteed. Parameter handling is done at the host level via Google Webmasters tool, whereas rel=”canonical” tag has to be put on each web page.
The rel=”canonical” tag is more effective as it is applicable to almost all the search engines, whereas Parameter Handling is applicable only to Google. This tag is to be put inside the <head> section of the duplicate URLs.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/products.php?item=woodchairs”>
By doing this the search engines would understand these duplicate URLs all refer to the main URL and avoids penalty. All other additional URL properties are also transferred during this.
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