Category: Duplicate Content

Dr. Pete Myers’ post, Rel=Confused? Answers to Your Rel=Canonical Questions, has reminded me that I have had a bee in my bonnet about the rel=canonical tag for a while that I’ve been meaning to get off my chest on these hallowed pages.  In short, the rel=canonical tag sucks. You can’t always tell if they are working Contrary to what Dr. Pete says, they still often show up in the index after they have been crawled, which tends to freak clients out after…

Google Webmaster Tools is a pretty cool tool for analyzing architectural issues with websites.  It can point you towards duplicate content issues, redirection issues, site performance issues, etc.  And best of all it’s free. Unfortunately all of this great data does come at a price: Complacency. When you get all of this awesome technology handed to you on a platter you may find yourself starting to use it all of the time, because it’s just so damn easy and free.…

I just spotted that Google Webmaster Central announced they are supporting a new tag, rel=canonical, that allows sites to specify which URLs on your site are the canonical versions.  They explain it in all of the gory detail on their blog, but in short when you have multiple versions of a single page, this tag will allow you to say that all of these urls should now be considered the single, canonical version with all the pagerank and SEOness passing…

Just got off the phone with a client who has some serious SEO issues.  One of the big ones is that there are ten-year-old URLs still in Google’s index that nobody knew about.  These URLs were put in place by people who are no longer at the company, and if I hadn’t done some creative searching, chances are they never would have known about them.  Did I mention that these URLs were rendering exact duplicates of the entire site?  I…