Page 24 - SEO Traffic

Day 17 Eliminate Duplicate Content
Online shops in particular often face the risk of generating duplicate content. For example, a product might be listed in several categories. If the URL is structured hierarchically, a product can be accessible under multiple URLs. One reliable way to solve this problem is by using a canonical tag. This shows Google which URL is the “original” one and which one is a copy. The Google bot then ignores the copies when crawling your website and only indexes the original URLs.
Hands-on Tips:
● Go to each page on your website and add a canonical tag.
● In case of duplicate content, the canonical tag should point to the original webpage. Also add a canonical tag on
the original webpage that points to itself.
● When adding canonical tags, make sure you write the URLs correctly.
● Do not use relative URLs for canonical tags.
Example:
Original URL: www.mywebsite.com/maincategory/page1.
Copy: www.mywebsite.com/othercategory/page1. You should add the following canonical tag on the copy:
<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.mywebsite.com/maincategory/page1”/>