For years affiliate marketers and website owners have to follow some restricted rules in order to avoid what so called duplicated content.

Duplicate content is a term that refers to a situation where the same webpage content can be found in several places over the net. Search engines like Google developed algorithms in their efforts to handle this situation.

It all started when people realized the power of search engines organic traffic as a way to generate money. They started to spam the network with content in order to get as many indexed paged. It is much easier to duplicate content with minor changes rather to generate unique valuable content. So not only that the search engines results become less relevant but they also had to deal with a huge amount of pages to process.

When Google first came out with the duplicated content algorithm there were some legit websites that suffer from it. In one night they lose major part of their organic traffic.
Websites owners had to adapt to the new situation while taking into consideration some serious restriction in terms of the user experience.  Take for example a typical e-commerce website. This kind of websites usually contains thousands of products. Usually within the product page you will find only few sentences about the product and lots of other content that can easily be found on the other products pages. Is this is a case of a duplicated content?

The personalization approach that PPC marketers are using were always relying on minor changes in the landing page. Search engines will consider it as a duplicate content while there is no doubt that this approach increase sales.

Its endless struggle while website owners want to make more money from their website while search engines don’t like when someone is trying to trick their search results pages.

As of few months ago there is a legit solution that supposes to help both the search engines and the website owners. Live search has partner with Google and Yahoo to support a new tag that will help websites to tell search engine about the situation (Partnering to help solve duplicate content issues)

The following is an example on how you can use the new tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com”/>

The use of it is very simple. Suppose you have a set if pages that looks like

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=6538″/>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=4564″/>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=3345″/>

Now you can tell the search engine that those pages are based on a different page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/product.php?pid=6538″/>

Please note that for now Live Search will not consider this tag as a command but as a hint. This is mainly to allow a period of time that they can test its implementation and to avoid any abuse of it.

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.