Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/143040
Duplicate Content continued the same page visiting either link and search engines will see it as two different pages. To understand how big an issue this could really be, let's imagine your marketing team created five different links to your "ranges category" from five different blogs and used a parameter in the URL to identify which blog the visitor came from.Your Webmaster created his own parameter structure in two different orders to get to your"ranges category." On top of that, your shopping cart system automatically creates a Session ID to track each visitor's session to your site. Let's say five people visited your "ranges category" today. That's five unique links created due to Session ID's that lead to the same page. In this short time,you now have over 12 links that lead to the same page! Now the one URL that should look like this http://www.mysite.com/ranges/ to search engines looks like this: http://www.mysite.com/ranges?session_id=visitor1 http://www.mysite.com/ranges?pcat=equipment&session_id =visitor2 http://www.mysite.com/ranges?sessionid=visitor3&pcat=equ ipment http://www.mysite.com/ranges?sessionid=visitor4?source=bl og5 …. and so on. The Solution: There are several ways you can fix the parameter duplicate content issues.The neat thing about these solutions is that they will fix a lot of other duplicate content issues not mentioned in this article as well! 301 Redirect A 301 redirect is a technical way of telling search engines and users, "sorry but this page has moved permanently, and here's the new address," and then taking them to the desired page. Setting up a 301 redirect is probably the best option for repairing duplicate content issues by redirecting search engines and traffic from duplicate pages to the original page. Combining multiple pages into one, takes away the ability for them to compete with each other and adds the authority of all pages into one.This gives you a much a better opportunity to rank well in search engines. Unfortunately setting up multiple 301 redirects can be a pretty complicated task and is not recommended for the novice webmaster. If you do not have a seasoned webmaster on staff, I recommend contacting your host provider for assistance or instructions. Canonical URL If 301 redirects are too complicated to implement, you may want to try using the rel=canonical tag. The canonical tag allows you to tell search engines what the correct URL should be (called the canonical URL). Telling search engines which page you wish to use as your canonical page is as easy as adding the following snippet of code within the
sec30 FEDA News & Views tion of your webpage: The snippet of code acts as a 301 redirect and, in turn, transfers the authority of the duplicate pages to the canonical page. So for example, if you were to put the above snippet of code into the section of your webpage, search engines will know both of these pages: http://www.mysite.com/ranges?sessionid=visitor1 http://www.mysite.com/ranges?pcat=equipment&sessionid= visitor2 Are equivalent to this: http://www.mysite.com/ranges/ Meta Robots Tag=noindex, follow There is another tag that can be used here called the meta robots tag. Meta robots tags can be used to perform different functions based on the variables you choose. For what we would like to accomplish, we will use the "noindex, follow" variables and place the meta robots tag on the "duplicate pages." The noindex, follow variables tell search engine bots "do not index this page, but you can go ahead and crawl the links on this page." Crawling links from duplicate pages will not harm your site so this is ok,but the real magic is your duplicate pages will not be indexed. To add the "robots meta" tag with the "noindex, follow" variable to duplicate pages of your site, add the following snippet of code within the section of your webpage: It is very important you do not add the robots tag with these variables to pages you want to be indexed, as the variables are telling search engines not to index the page the snippet of code is on. Webmaster Tools Since search engines are trying to get rid of duplicate content themselves, both Google and Bing allow you to control how each search engine should handle parameters in your URL within the dashboard of their diagnostic tools, "Google Webmaster Tools" and "Bing Webmaster Tools." For detailed instructions on how to setup Google's "URL Parameters," visit their Webmaster Tools help center here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=e n&answer=1235687 For detailed instructions on how to setup Bing's"Ignore URL Parameters," visit their Webmaster Tools help center here: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/ignore-url-parameters-d7496c65 Finding Duplicate Content Issues on Your Site Now that we have discussed common causes and solutions, continued on page 40