Duplicate content problems solved at last

[sgpratley]

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Looks like there's hope on the horizon for anyone suffering dupe content in their dynamic sites

The Online Marketing Blog - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! announce a solution to duplicate content problems.

Still won't help you if you're scraping your content from other sources but it'll stop you shooting yourself in the foot with your own site!

[JamesEvansSEO]

Hello Stephen,

Thank you for bringing that up Stephen, as usual your blog is always up to date... one of the best in the industry!

James

[d33man]

Might be a long shot, but when was this announced? My rankings have dropped off a cliff, could it be down to this?

Thanks,D

[averasolutions]

This is great for forums and blogs that have a "plain text" version.

At this time, I can't think of any way this can be abused - but I'm sure someone will abuse it in some way.

Oh by the way, one of the blod posts says that you can also use the

rel="canonical"

syntax within a <a> link tag.

[d33man]

Can I just clarify - I've followed some SEO tips on using the robots.txt file to filter out (my wordpress) pages that I don't wnat indexed, for duplicate content concerns.

I assume in this case i'm good as i am or should i still consider the "canonical" link? i'm sure it will have no harm adding it except for the time required to add it!! thanks, D

[Brendon]

*sigh*, this is the search disaster of 2010 in waiting. Yes, it can be abused. No, the SE's seem not to have a clue. I've long maintained the SE engineers know feck all about search (whilst I'll acknowledge their brilliance as Information Retrieval specialists), and I find it depressing to have my worst prejudices confirmed. Again

[hpops]

Brendon, would be very interested to hear your views on potential abuse.
Is the canonical tag recognised across domains (in which case, its fairly obvious). What you heard mate?

[ContentBoss]

*sigh*, this is the search disaster of 2010 in waiting. Yes, it can be abused. No, the SE's seem not to have a clue. I've long maintained the SE engineers know feck all about search (whilst I'll acknowledge their brilliance as Information Retrieval specialists), and I find it depressing to have my worst prejudices confirmed. Again

sounds interesting Brendon. Are you thinking along the lines of being able to 'collapse' multiple doc locations into a single superset to create a leverage? Or do you have something even bigger in mind?

[Barry]

Brendon, would be very interested to hear your views on potential abuse.
Is the canonical tag recognised across domains (in which case, its fairly obvious). What you heard mate?

It does not work across domains.

sounds interesting Brendon. Are you thinking along the lines of being able to 'collapse' multiple doc locations into a single superset to create a leverage? Or do you have something even bigger in mind?

Would be worth a try wouldn't it :tup

Ta

Baz

[Brendon]

>> It does not work across domains.

It works across subdomains though. That's a positional weakness you can drive light armour through. Google also explicitly state that the redir target page can be a redirect. Which is handy, if you're an affiliate. Or a spammer. Or both.

Or a quote from Ys blurb :

" The <link> tag will be treated similarly to a 301 redirect, in terms of transferring link references and other effects to the canonical form of the page."

Similarly to, so presumably not the same as. Although Yahoo have a pretty good record of being able to process redirects (better than Googles' at any rate), I'd like to bet someone, somewhere will figure out how to abuse any differences.

Perhaps my biggest concern though is non-technical - how many webmasters are actually going to ever hear about this? Those of us for whom the web is a living (or in my case a lifestyle / curse) may well hear about it, and understand it's implications, but the fact remains that a great deal of good content is produced by hobbyist webmasters, who are now effectively placed at an inherent disadvantage compared to any site run by a savvy person / team.

[trooperbill]

Its great if you're using price sorting and information re-organising through querystrings as it says 'use all these urls as if theyre this url'

nice stuff indeed.

Ive used it on the distinctive site to stop all the size charts (popups) from being listed independently.

[averasolutions]

You can't use it accross multiple domains, but you can use it on sub-domains.

This means that you can do this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/permalink.html" />

where your page is:

http://mydomain.com/page?=permalink-...ent=descending

[trooperbill]

You can't use it accross multiple domains, but you can use it on sub-domains.

This means that you can do this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/permalink.html" />

where your page is:

http://mydomain.com/page?=permalink-...ent=descending

use it on subdomains... really!!! thats pretty cool.

I dont think half of what this can be used for has been discovered

[averasolutions]

Agreed, but the more it can be used for , the more it will be abused by spammers and hackers!

[trooperbill]

Agreed, but the more it can be used for , the more it will be abused by spammers and hackers!

lol yeah, plough all link juice into my home page lol