| Duplicate content worry is an issue we hear
about daily from x-cart owners concerned about their x-cart SEO rankings, so imagine my
excitement this morning when I woke up and found that Google has released a solution to
alleviate these worries.
Its important to note first that duplicate content is
something people tend to worry about more than they need to, and that its ability to
impact your search results negatively are highly over-estimated. What tends to happen when
two pages share the same content, is that one is selected to rank high in Google while the
other is pushed towards the bottom. This is only a significant problem when search engines
give weight to the wrong URL. While distinguishing the correct URL is something search
engines - particularly Google - is very good at, clearly they hear about duplicate content
concerns a great deal, resulting in the birth of the new canonical tag - a combined effort
between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Google's new canonical tag allows you to specify the page
URL you want to be given indexing priority. If for example you have the following pages:
http://www.example.com/page.php
http://www.example.com/page.php?sort=asc http://www.example.com/page.php?sort=desc
You can now modify these pages to include the new
'canonical' tag as follows:
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.example.com/page.php" />
We will be adapting our x-cart SEO Custom Dynamic Search
Engine (CDSEO) Pro module for canonical support shortly. |
