The rel=”canonical” link duplicate content panacea

As many readers probably know, Google and other search engines recently announced support for a rel=”canonical” link attribute value. The new attribute value canonical (not a tag mind you, link is the html tag) can be used by website developers to specify which of essentially similar web pages is the definitive version.

A SEO problem known as duplicate content arises when websites use different URLs, generally through parameters, to provide slightly different versions of a page, such as a printer friendly version, or to support web analytics campaign tracking. In order to give search users unique choices, search engines tend to choose the “best” URL for a page, filtering out similar versions.

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Several months ago a client inspired me to write a comprehensive guide to keeping website content out of search engines. Usually website owners are focused on the opposite side of search engine optimization, insuring web content is well indexed. Yet, as many can attest, search engines can be all too efficient at finding documents they shouldn’t. Thus, the need to understand what options exist, how they work and which search engines support them.

One problem with the techniques available up until now is that options for digital media have been limited. The official way to keep video, audio and pdf files out of search engines was through the robots.txt protocol, not a very efficient tool when setting indexing options on a file level.

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While it may seem paradoxical, there are many occasions where you may want to exclude a website or portion of a site from search engine crawling and indexing. One typical need is to keep duplicate content, such as printer friendly versions, out of a search engine’s index. The same is true for pages available both in HTML and PDF or word processor formats. Other examples include site “service pages” such as user friendly error message and activity confirmation pages. Special considerations apply for ad campaign landing pages.

There are several ways to prevent Google, Yahoo!, Bing or Ask from indexing a site’s pages. In this article, we look at the different search engine blocking methods, considering each method’s pros and cons.

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