October 31, 201312 yr I have a 301 redirect implimented via an htaccess file, I have told Google to make the www.mysite.com priority over mysite.com in GWT, and yet various tools such as Nibbler is saying there is still duplicate content between the www and non-www version of my site. When the ...com/index.html is clicked (from both the www and non-www version of the url), it does redirect to www.mysite.com so I know it works. Below is the code from the htaccess file. rewriteengine on rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [OR] rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ rewriterule ^index\.html$ "http\:\/\/www\.mysite\.com\/" [R=301,L] #************* My question is, despite having the 301, do I need to add a canocial meta tag to my html? What else can be done to dispense of the "duplicate content" error? Thank you for your time.
November 5, 201312 yr 301 and canonical both are different in sense/. First of all i would like tell you 301 is used for permanetly redirect your website or any webpage for particular destination. Like page123 page permanetly redirect to page1 so this is best for using 301 in your page123. Add tag to move it. Now i would explain you canonical tag= Canonical tag basically is used to overcome dublicate content issues. Just imagine if you have two or three pages but you want to use same content in every pages. So can use canonical tag in your others pages. Like you have page1 and you want to use page1 content in others page like page2, page3 and so on. Now you have to use canonical tag
November 5, 201312 yr I suggest adding canonical to each page ensuring it's set to <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/pagename.html"> To clarify I always safeguard pages with canonical to explain and consolidate duplicate pages found by chance. These in your case is http://domain and http://www.domain being treated as 2 pages. The canonical set with www will become the main page and search engines will as such forget the http://domain version exists. By always adding them you can avoid other issues such as https and http duplicates.
November 5, 201312 yr Author Thank you for the advice. Wasn't sure if both were needed. Now both are in place <link rel="canonical" href=http://www.mysite.com/> has been placed at the very top just inside the <head> tag. Is this better than lower in the <head> tag below everything else? I ran a test in nibbler / silktide and it says the duplicate content is still there. ? Thoughts? On a side note, does over testing in sites such as the above cause a decline in rank? Just curious. Thank you in advance. Edited November 5, 201312 yr by iems
November 6, 201312 yr Thank you for the advice. Wasn't sure if both were needed. Now both are in place <link rel="canonical" href=http://www.mysite.com/> has been placed at the very top just inside the <head> tag. Is this better than lower in the <head> tag below everything else? This makes no difference, the head is the head as far as I can tell. I ran a test in nibbler / silktide and it says the duplicate content is still there. ? Thoughts? Even webmaster tools takes a while to clean up. I have seen larger sites > 600,000 pages take up to 3 months to fully clean up. Even using 301 it can take a few weeks for the search engine to twig that http/yadayada.com/oldpage.html is now http/yadayada.com/newpage.html and then it needs to twig that http/yadayada.com/newpage.html is in fact http/www.yadayada.com/newpage.html. On a side note, does over testing in sites such as the above cause a decline in rank? I don't see why it should, tools are there to be testing and I wouldn't think search engines would mind us using tools to test if we have fixed duplicate content issues if they are the ones who object to it.
November 10, 201312 yr Author <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/" /> is located on the index page. Each subsequent page has their own canocial as well. The tag ended up just below the <head> tag above everything else, including the charset tag. Is this going to be ok? After adding the tags, nibbler is still not picking it up. The site is 10 pages total that the sitemap can see. Did I add it wrong? On a side note, where in GWT would it say if it is seeing duplicate content? Just curious. Again, I have a 301 in place via htaccess as well as both (w/ & w/o www) in GWT telling Google in both cases that I want the www to be the primary site. Thank you for your time.
January 24, 201412 yr <link rel="canonical" href="/blog" /> code sample Canonicalization can be a challenging concept to understand (and hard to pronounce: "ca-non-ick-cull-eye-zay-shun"),but it's essential to creating an optimized website. The fundamentalproblems that canonicalization can fix stem from multiple uses for asingle piece of writing–a paragraph or, more often, an entire page ofcontent–that appears in multiple locations on one website or on multiplewebsites. For search engines, this presents a conundrum: Which versionof this content should they show to searchers?
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