Bye Bye duplicate content, Canonical URLs to the rescue!
Well it’s not strictly true, duplicate content will still be an issue for a lot of sites!
Anyway, last week at SMX West, Google, Yahoo and MSN announced that they now accept the rel=”canonical” variable.
What does this mean?
Let’s take a look at Majestic Wine. Their site uses a large database which displays wines based on your choices from the navigation on the left hand side.
Majestic Wines Canonical URLs - Example 1
In the above example I’ve selected Wine > France > Loire > White
This URL was generated:
http://www.majestic.co.uk/find/category-is-Wine/category-is-France/category-is-Loire/Colour-is-White+Wine
However if I then select them in a different order, i.e. Wine > White > France > Loire, I get this URL:
http://www.majestic.co.uk/find/category-is-Wine/Colour-is-White+Wine/category-is-France/category-is-Loire
Despite the 2 different URLs the page content is exactly the same. Until now search engines may have seen this as duplicate content but now that they’ve introduced rel=”canonical”, this will no longer be a problem for ecommerce sites.
So how do Canonical URL Links work?
