Do you worry about the duplicate web-page content problem because you have the same information appearing at multiple URLs?
Now you can tell the search engines which one of those URLs should be indexed.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have agreed on a new "canonical link tag" that will allow one to specify the preferred URL that should be indexed from amongst multiple versions of the same page.
The properties like PageRank associated with the dummy pages will be transferred to the canonical URL.
The Canonical Link Tag
You will need to add an extra tag to all the pages you consider duplicates of your real web page. This extra tag contains the URL (called the canonical URL) that the search engines will index instead of the duplicate pages.
Simply add an entry similar to the following in the <head> section of all the duplicate web pages.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/real/"/>
Please see the corresponding announcements at Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.
- Yahoo: Fighting Duplication: Adding more arrows to your quiver
- Google: Specify your canonical
- Microsoft: Partnering to help solve duplicate content issues
