Google Tries To Resolve Duplicate Content Penalty Worries

In an effort to deal with webmasters’ concerns over the storied “duplicate content penalty”. Google has previously dispelled the rumor that websites are “penalized” for having similar content that is accessible through multiple urls. They did admit, however, that there could be an unintended penalty in the form of Google choosing the incorrect url as the primary source. Today Google staff has announced a new method that can be used to specify which is your preferred version of the URL.

The way that this can now be accomplished is through the use of the rel=”canonical” link attribute. If you have multiple pages with very similar content, simply add the following tag iito the <head> section of any pages that could be considered duplicate content.

<link rel=”canonical href=”link to preferred url” />

For further explanation and some actual examples of this in action, see Google’s post on the topic.