Comments on: Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag

By: Rob @ Web Design Talk

Rob @ Web Design Talk — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:25:09 +0000

Hi,

What would you recommend doing for paged product data on an eCommerce site? E.g. domain.com/category/dvds.php?page=1, domain.com/category/dvds.php?page=1#2 etc.

Thanks

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 10:53:29 +0000

What is the code for canonical tags?

By: Introspective

Introspective — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:49:04 +0000

Should I stop publish my articles on article directories? I used to publish my articles, but now I wander should I stop doing this, because the risk of duplicate content penalty.

By: Mani

Mani — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:52:45 +0000

I’ve always avoided using NOFOLLOW, and now it seems as though it’s no longer beneficial to site owners to use it. I guess the search engines do need to keep a few things to themselves though, otherwise SEO would turn into a science and you’d have over-optimised sites everywhere… Would that be better? ;)

By: Bill Sebald

Bill Sebald — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:55:10 +0000

Sculpting always seemed to be boosting my efforts in at least “light” ways (though I never had the massive lifts that SEOs talked about in the early nofollow days), so I’m taking the side that the SMX words are being misinterpreted until something clear comes out. If something changed, and the PR transfer became even lower than before, then I believe it would have JUST changed within the month.

It’s still at the least valuable in keeping the index free of noise (and wasting spider efficiency on junk pages).

By: Damien Anderson

Damien Anderson — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:58:48 +0000

HAHA! I so loved the ‘on another note’ comment at the end of the feature! Melted mine as well!

Damien

By: Vern | AimforAwesome

Vern | AimforAwesome — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:37:37 +0000

I’ve never seen this mentioned… what about with multiple state focused sites… we have startillinoisbusiness.com, startgeorgiabusiness.com etc. They are all completely different focus, yet – we duplicate some of the info because it’s all about incorporation – which – at a national level doesn’t change much at all. I’ve been noindexing the pages that are duplicate but heck, that’s like 20 pages per site. Should I or no? I’d think no – Georgia is different from Illinois. The user experience is a good one if the info is same because it’s all great info – despite being the same. Quite a tricky question and I don’t know how to do this the right way… anyone?

By: Halfdeck

Halfdeck — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:51:50 +0000

“That is absolutely WRONG.”

Michael, that is absolutely RIGHT.

Matt Cutts has ALWAYS said there’s nothing unethical about PageRank sculpting. In fact, linking pages together (the old fashioned way) IS a form of sculpting, according to him. Are you telling me you want to unlink all the pages on your site? Come on man.

He consistently made the point that sculpting isn’t necessarily a high ROI tactic and that you’d be better off making $200k extra bucks instead of squeezing 10% interest out of $50k invested in stocks.

#popcorn #vodka

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:24:15 +0000

Halfdeck wrote: “No, his stance has always been that PageRank sculpting of all forms is perfectly fine.”

That is absolutely WRONG. Matt Cutts has ALWAYS, consistently cautioned people against pursuing this tactic. It was Rand Fishkin who misattributed his own views on PageRank Sculpting to Matt on SEOmoz, and people have consistently ignored Matt’s correction in the comments to that particular article.

PageRank Sculpting has always been a stupid idea because no one in the SEO industry has had the ability to measure PageRank. This methodology is equivalent to throwing darts while blind-folded after being spun around and moved through several different rooms.

You’d have more luck managing your PageRank by playing traditional pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey than by using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links. At least with the game you have a chance of actually hitting something.

By: Suthnautr

Suthnautr — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:56:00 +0000

I’ve noticed that Sugarrae.com has implemented Canonical tags – but I’ve also noticed that Sugarrae.com took a leap from an 89 in Website.Grader.com (I know – that tool has it’s problems, but I use it once in a while anyway) to a 99.2. That’s a nice leap – and I can’t help but wonder whether it was Rae’s link sculpting efforts, the canonical tags or a combination of both.

On the note of “nofollow” not being as well honored by Google more recently, I’ve never trusted the nofollow tag alone so on my site a large majority of my external links are placed within an iFrame on the right of each page. Outside of using Javascript or flash links (both of which may soon be readable anyway) there’s not much else I can think of to stop follows for sure.

As for the page sculpting comment “Nathan from Microsoft also off-the-cuff mention that if you use nofollow as a way of PR sculpting and they feel it’s not beneficial to the user — they’ll adjust the algorithm” …I’m wondering what that means – does it mean manually per site adjustment, overall ignoring nofollow in links linking files within a domain, or all nofollow tags – external site links as well as internal. (I’m hoping that if this were to occur it would only apply to individual sites abusing nofollows (?) and not an algorithm change for all sites.).