Home » Duplicate Content & Cronicle Tag

Duplicate Content & Cronicle Tag

The Cronical tag is a great way to eliminate any chance of duplicate content within your website

Ex:- Lets say we have a page on a website... It may load onto a brouser in many fomats simular to the following.

URL 1 – http://samplesite.com

URL 2 – http://samplesite.com/index

URL 2 – http://www.samplesite.com

URL 2 – http://www.samplesite.com/index

There is a good chance that google could see all these pages as four different pages, if that is the case google consider all to have the same content.

There are free SEO tools around to find this information but the safest way to prevent any issues with duplicate content is to add a cronical tag to every page of your website...

It is as simple as adding a piece of code into your meta tag directing google or any other search engine to the correct page with the original content, you need to apply the cronical tag to every page of your website to eliminate any duplicate content issues.

This a piece of code from the meta tag of this page.

<title>Duplicate content | Cronicle Tag | Seo 1</title>

Now if this was my home page I would have done it like this.

<title>SEOt | Search Engine Optimisation| Seo 1</title> <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.seo1.co.nz/"/>

Can you see the pattern, if you cant, you need my help!! Here is a bit more information about duplicate content and the cronical tag.

Now, when there are references to the two URLs from another or more website, with similar or same anchor texts, Google will find it difficult to decide which page to place on the results pages.

In such situations, Google might take its own time to decide which page to show up on the search engine listings for a related search. It’s more like a confused state. (Bots aren’t always smart you see.)
So that explains why a website should contain minimum duplicate entries or duplicate content.

It might not be possible to completely avoid duplicate content on a website, but the idea is to curb it to the minimum causing the least confusion.

So what is a Canonical tag?

How does it help in dealing with duplicate content ? A canonical tag is a simple piece of HTML code ( ) that you insert into the section of a duplicate page, letting the search engines know that they are on a duplicate page and they need to find the original content elsewhere, and guide them there.

So let’s pick another example.

Page 1 - http://www.google.com/duplicate-content.html (Original source content)

Page 2 – http://www.google.com/duplicate-content-800×600.html (Duplicate content)

Now, you add the canonical link tag to the duplicate page, Page 2. <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.google.com/duplicate-content.html " />

So what happens now? As soon as Google bots land on the duplicate page (page with the canonical tag), it does not give weight age to the content on that page, rather follows the original URL in the canonical tag code. Where/Which pages should you add a canonical tag? Technically , any page that you think will loop the content from a different page.

For example – http://www.yoursite.com/page1.php?sessionid=12+author=ben should be canonically tagged to http://www.yoursite.com/page1.php.

How does Canonical Tag help Wordpress blogs ? In my opinion, canonical tags should not be automated on Wordpress blogs. Because although there are several occurrences of possible duplicate content on Wordpress, the canonical tags may not work there efficiently as they require some amount of manual checks. For example, on Wordpress blogs, tags and archives creates a possible duplicate content situation, but not either can be effectively controlled by canonical tags. In such situations, meta noindex tags are far more effective. But in instances like series posts (101-tips-part1.html and 101-tips-part2.html) , where IF the content are strikingly similar, one may manually insert the canonical tags to good use. Otherwise, I’d stay away from automation at least for now.

Duplicate content is a real threat to your pagerank, that is is page rank is important to you.