Canonical Issues & Duplicate Content

How specifying a canonical can help in solving your duplicate content Issues

We are going to talk about www vs. non-www,

An example of this duplicate content from a domain that should know better http://validator.w3.org http://validator.w3.org/index.html is the same page

This is just to give you an example of what this is about.

If you don’t see anything wrong with this you need to read this artical

Sever side fixes

Canonical Issues & Duplicate Content

What’s happening here is the search engine bots are seeing duplicate content because the URL http://www.domain.com

And the http://www.domain.com/index.html pages are usually same content in almost all websites but technically all of these URLS are different address and could be different pages. Just adding to the confusion the http://domain.com and the http://domain.com/index.html also should return the same page. So the search engine has to decide which is the best page to return, by picking what it believes is the best URL when there are several choices and which webpage page is the duplicate content.

To make matters even worse when you have other sites linking to your domain with more then one of these URLs it is splitting your page rank.

Search engines can not just disregard any of the URLS as some domains do have different content on them. Some people believe this can be sorted out in Google’s webmasters tools, which is not really true at the time of writing this Google webmasters tools it asks you how you would like your URLS to be displayed in the SERP with the www, Or without that’s all, not how it should index your URLs into their database

It’s hard to believe the number of sites this affects

To fix this on an apache web server you need a .htaccess file you can edit on your server just copy the text below to the top of your .htaccess file and replace the yourdomain with your own and change the .com if necessary

RewriteEngine on

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301,L]

And that’s it all the search engine bots and in coming links will be redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com domain address in so removing any duplicate content issues and boosting your page rank by redirecting all incoming links to your http://www.yourdomain.com domain address.

Google has come out with a Meta tag fix which is: