Duplicate contents, one of the issue of a website that usually committed by designers, developers and owners. This usually causes some sites not to be indexed properly by the leading search engines. This is sometimes cause of improper use of www and non-www version of the site. This kind of duplication is usually called as a canonical issue and can be solved easily using permanent 301 redirect but the problem with this solution is some site owners don’t have enough authority to change this kind of .htaccess configuration. In Google webmasters tool, this www and non-www issue is usually solved by simple configuration on this Google tool. Now for other search engines, they don’t have any specific solution for this but instead they deal it through their own internal algo.
Not until the other month, search engines – Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN announced that they can recognize the canonical link element to be embeded on pages with duplication issues. This is a small code that let you redirect a page in a domain to another page on the same domain without using the 301 redirect. Now, how can you implement it with your site. Well you can do it manually or if you are using a CMS like WordPress there’s already a plug-in for that and I think WordPress will do this stuff automatically on their next update/version.
If you want to apply it to your site manually, this is what you need to do. For example, you want to redirect http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html to http://www.yourdomain.com/ then you should add the following code to your header tag in index.html:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com"/>
It is so easy right? But you should do this correctly to make it effective. You should identify pages of the site to apply this changes and embed the code to the pages properly. I also recommend that you watch this video of Matt Cutts on canonical link element so that you will have a broader understanding about this matter. I think the people behind this have a better explanation about this. Now, if you can’t do it by yourself, you could ask a SEO Consultant like me to do it for you. It will be the quick and more convenient way to deal with this issue. Contact me now at admin @ bleuken.com, for a quote of my SEO services.