The web is growing leaps and bounds with each passing day. In this competition, the biggest sacrifice that online businesses are making is originality. As the race is real-time, they do not invest time and money in performing original research and are simply duplicating the content of other websites on their website, with a different presentation though. This is leading to the unnecessary consumption of web resources and customer’s time and effort. It’s a fight for the original identity out there.

Search Engines to the Rescue
The primary task of search engines is related with indexing and displaying original versions of information as per the user requests. Site owners continuously try to better their websites and earn them a high page ranking. Hence, if multiple versions exist in the web, they might lose out in this ranking race on account of the dilution of the credit of their links. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have identified this issue and are coming up with a way of reducing duplicate content listings in their results. The original content would be referred as the canonical version by them.

How Duplicate Content Occurs?
Duplicate content can show itself up in various kinds of forms but the most common scenario would be of multiple URL’s pointing to exactly the same webpage. This might occur in various instances such as e-commerce sites allowing the display of orders through different types of sorting with the addition of tracking codes to each of these URL’s for facilitating the analysis work of marketing personnel. This leads to each page having several URL’s that might prove to be problematic because:

• Site’s Crawl-Facilitating Visibility Gets Reduced: Limited bandwidth is used by the crawlers of search engines for discovering and indexing sites. This means that if the crawler can discover 100 web pages at once, then it is desired that all these 100 pages should be unique, rather than 10 pages being crawled for 10 different times.
• Reduced Link Credit: This might occur because of less number of URL’s pointing to a particular page.

Understanding Canonical Tag

• A page can be versioned as canonical by adding a specific tag in its head section.
• This tag can be used only on pages belonging to a single website.
• It is more advantageous to use absolute links over relative links.
• The canonical URL would be the receiver of all pointing URL’s and it shall be used by search engines for crawling and indexing that particular website.
• The site has to follow particular guidelines for using this tag, failing which it shall have to face the consequences of manipulating search engines.
• This tag is useful only for identical or similar content and cannot generate results when used for transferring link credit from a site’s less important web pages to the ones that are more important.

Versioning the pages as canonical may not completely solve the problem of duplication on web but things will definitely become much easier for site owners losing out in the competition, especially e-commerce sites. Use it and benefit from it!

Tags: e-commerce sites, fight for the original identity, multiple URL's, reduceing duplicate content, the race is real-time

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, SEO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.