Duplicate Contents

One of the tips that I give you through my article, “How to optimize Domain and URL“, is by helping the search engine find the “Canonical URL” among the duplicate contents in your blog.

Normally, a single content of your website or blog can be accessed using different URLs.

For example: The Pinoy Bloggers Directory can be accessed using these URLs:

1. pinoyblogger.com
2. pinoyblogger.com/
3. pinoyblogger.com/index.php
4. www.pinoyblogger.com
5. www.pinoyblogger.com/
6. www.pinoyblogger.com/index.php

For us, these URLs are all the same because of the fact that whichever of these URLs that we are going to use, only one content will be shown.

However, for the search engines, each 1 of these URLs are different webpages. But since they all have common content, so search engines automatically consider them duplicate contents.

Would the search engines penalize duplicate contents?

Lots of bloggers  are worried that their blogs will be penalized by the search engines because of duplicate issues within their blogs.

FYI, you have nothing to worry of regarding the penalty that search engines might impose against your blog due to these kind of duplicate contents.  It’s because search engines know and understand that these kind of duplicate contents within your blog are just the result of the imperfection of the platform you use in blogging or of your website in general.

So, on this case, the search engines will decide by itself which among these duplicate contents within that single domain is canonical. And the one which is chosen to be the canonical webpage is the one that will be included on the SERP.

What you should actually worry about is the PR (Page Rank) points of your preferred URL for a particular content.

You should understand that other bloggers might link to your blog’s content using the URLs they knew. For example, few bloggers link to the Pinoy Bloggers Directory using the URL, pinoyblogger.com. Then some bloggers use the URL www.pinoyblogger.com. Then other bloggers use the URL pinoyblogger.com/index.php…. so on…

So, the result is that the PR points that should be given to that single content are divided into several URLs. For example:

• pinoyblogger.com got 100 PR points
• www.pinoyblogger.com got 1,000 PR points
• pinoyblogger.com/index.php earned 500 PR points

That certain content supposed to have 1,600 PR points. But since the search engine will choose among these three URLs the canonical one, so the PR points of that content would be the value of that canonical URL.

Now, what if the competitor’s canonical URL of the content got 1,500 and that the PR point of the canonical URL of your blog’s content only has 500 points. So, your content will be ranked lower in the SERP than that of the competitor’s content. But if all the 1,600 PR points given on that example will be credited to the canonical URL, then your blog’s content will be ranked first on the SERP because your blog’s content total PR points is higher than that of the competitor (1,600 PR point > 1,500 PR point).

So, how can we resolve this problem?

Canonicalization

The only solution to this kind of problem is to do the canonicalization within your website or blog. Don’t just leave the job of canonicalizing duplicate content in your website or blog to the search engines. Instead, help the search engines learn which is the canonical one among the duplicate contents.

However, since almost all of you (my audience) are bloggers and most of you are using the Wordpress platform, then you have nothing to worry again because people behind the Wordpress platform and other updated blogging platforms are working hard so that duplicate contents on the blogs using that blogging platform will be eliminated.

But you still have to do one thing… You need to update regularly the Wordpress software in your server.

But for you to understand how the canonicalization process is done within your blog, I will still explain this here.

So, how to solve it?

1) Issue a 301 redirect

In the example given above, we have 6 different URLs that can be used to access one single content. Among these 6 different URLs, we should decide which should be the preferred URL. Then we will issue 301 (permanent redirect) from the 5 other URLs to the preferred one.

With this method, all the PR points earned by the other 5 URL will be transfered to the preferred URL.

2) Give hint using “Canonical Link Element”

Just last month, major search engines supported a way of giving hint to the search engines on what is the canonical URL among these duplicate content. It’s by the use of the link element in the head part of the webpage.

If you’ll look at the Page Source, you’ll notice the codes enclosed by the tag <head> and </head>. Just before the </head> tag, insert the link element given below in all the duplicate content.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://selaplana.com/” />

Note: selaplana.com is the domain of my blog and in your blog, selaplana.com should be replaced by the domain of your blog.

This Link Element tells search engines that URL given is the canonical one.

For example: From the URLs given in our example above, you’ll choose www.pinoyblogger.com as the canonical URL, then in the other 5 URLs insert a link element:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.pinoyblogger.com/” />

So that everytime search engines visit the URLs:

1. pinoyblogger.com
2. pinoyblogger.com/
3. pinoyblogger.com/index.php
4. www.pinoyblogger.com
5. www.pinoyblogger.com/index.php

…they will know that these contents are just the duplicate of the www.pinoyblogger.com/. And then all the PR points or PR juices that those 5 other URLs earned will be transferred or credited to the www.pinoyblogger.com/.

SEO Related Articles

Ligoy na bata asked me before:

Hello, what does canonical link do in your blog? THanks.

Hope that this article answered his query.

And just to let you know that this article is still part of our discussion about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. I already published few articles about it and these are:

1. Search Engine Optimization?
2. On-Site Search Engine Optimization?
3. Search Engine Optimizing Domain and URL?
4. Optimizing URL of Wordpress Blog?
5. Off-Site Search Engine Optimization

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