Having duplicate content across more than one domain has been a problematic issue for some online businesses for many years. For a long time the theory was that duplicate content was being penalized by search engines, particularly big brother Google. They have said on many occasions they don’t penalize, rather, they select what they feel is the most appropriate ‘original’ version of the content.

Why have duplicate content? There are actually many situations where you may have duplicate content quite legitimately. This content is spread around two or more domains, often where businesses have websites specific to various countries. The cure – back to Google again.

Google introduced a canonical rel tag earlier this year that enables webmasters to identify which version of a page of content was the original. That was fine for single sites where archives, categories and tags often meant the same content was appearing with different URLs. Using the rel=”canonical” tag helped to solve that problem.

Earlier this week Google announced the cross domain support for the tag. This means you can have content on a site here in Scotland and duplicate it on sites in other parts of world. The use of the rel element for cross domain issues is link rel=”canonical” href=”original page url”.

There are several points to note with this tag. First, Google uses the tag as a hint – not as a command. Second, the tag is not currently supported by other search engines and, finally, using 301 redirects will override the rel tag.

Whilst not a perfect solution for duplicate content, it is a quick and easy aid to help the search engines determine which version of a piece of content is the original – and down the track, it should act as a reminder if you go through any web redesign processes.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Search Engines. 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.