Fight PageRank Leakage and Algorithmic Penalties: Canonicalize!

Use a simple <link> element in the <HEAD> of your page to identify which is the real page. This makes your link juice flow in the right direction.

In a page reachable by both of the following url’s:

www.dayspring-tech.com/work/featured/ucsf-path-lab-redesign
www.dayspring-tech.com/work/universities-and-education/ucsf-path-lab-redesign

we would put the following:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.dayspring-tech.com/work/universities-and-education/ucsf-path-lab-redesign”/>
</head>

By doing this, whenever links go to the non-canonical address, the inbound link value is still flowed to the correct canonical URL. AND, you help the search engines out by de-confusing them re: related content.

Supported by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft Live (and Bing?) and Yahoo!.

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical.

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This entry was posted by Chi-Ming on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

One Response to “Fight PageRank Leakage and Algorithmic Penalties: Canonicalize!”

  1. Jeffrey W. says:
    June 4, 2009 at 10:04 am

    This is one of the techniques mentioned at Google I/O to stop Pagerank “dilution” as they called it.

    http://blog.dayspring-tech.com/2009/05/search-friendly-development/