HTML Syntax to Tell Google About Duplicate Pages

Friday, February 13, 2009

HTML Syntax to Tell Google About Duplicate Pages

If you have several URLs for the same page of your site, you can now tell Google what the main URL is supposed to be. Google suggests that this can help with consolidating how your site appears in Google results, and also, what kind of PageRank specific pages may accumulate. On a given duplicate page – say, www.example.com/link-to-main-page?foo=bar – include the following bit in the <head> section:

<link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.example.com/link-to-main-page" />

Google notes your pages don’t have to be exactly the same in order for this to be used. “We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products.” However, you’re not supposed to point to another domain as your main URL. Keep in mind though that as long as this is not an industry-wide standard for all search engines, it may still make sense – if you rely on other search engines – to design your site without search engine behavior details (or that link tag) in mind. Yahoo and Microsoft announced they are supporting this as well. [Thanks Joseph and Mbegin!]

[Thanks Nate T.!]

HTML Syntax to Tell Googl ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6)

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