Live Search Partnering to Help Solve Duplicate Content Issues

April 30, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik

As we all do some link building, or a lot of link building, we’ve been dealing with the issue of multiple duplication of the same URL in its different forms which plays a part with indexing in the search engines. Live search blog had a great post on how they are joining with Google and Yahoo to combat this problem.

http://mysite.com

A webmaster may consider this their authoritative or canonical URL for their homepage.

http://www.mysite.com

However, you can add ‘www’ to most websites and still get the same home page.

http://mysite.com/default.aspx

You can also often add the specific filename of the homepage and get the same page

http://mysite.com/default.aspx?promo=ABC

Many times websites use parameters to track things like where customers are coming from (in this case an offline promotion), or parameters that determine how the content on the page is formatted.

“To help solve this issue, Live Search has partnered with Google and Yahoo to support a new tag attribute that will help webmasters identify the single authoritative (or canonical) URL for a given page. The link tag defines a relationship between a document and an external resource. In this case, that resource is the canonical URL. The following is an example of the new link tag attribute for canonicalization:

A few notes about the implementation of the new attribute:

* This tag will be interpreted as a hint by Live Search, not as a command. We’ll evaluate this in the context of all the other information we know about the website and try and make the best determination of the canonical URL. This will help us handle any potential implementation errors or abuse of this tag.
* You can use relative or absolute URLs in the “href” attribute of the link tag.
* The page and the URL in the “href” attribute must be on the same domain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx”, and the ”href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://mysite2.com”, the tag will be invalid and ignored.
o However, the “href” attribute can point to a different subdomain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx” and the “href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://www.mysite.com”, the tag will be considered valid.
* Live Search expects to implement support for this feature sometime in the near future.”

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