Do I need to do anything with masking?
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Hello, I read up a bit on rel=cansomething where if a page has duplicate content you should put the tag there linking to the real page.
I have a godaddy domain that uses blogger for it's posts currently (Foward with masking). Do I need this tag?
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Okay I finally got some host gator hosting but I have no idea what to do. I am up to the part where I am entering the details for the CNAME but it says the record already exists?
What the ??
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It can be a bit tough without seeing the domain (since these situation can vary a lot), but I tend to agree with Matthew - the masking can cause a lot of strange side-effects, for search and visitors. One thing I'd definitely do is so how Google is indexing your content. You can just use the "site:" operator:
site:example.com
(with your domain, and leave off the "www") - if your correct domain is showing up with indexed pages, and there aren't a ton of duplicates, you're probably doing ok. If your posts aren't being indexed and are only showing up under the Blogger domain, then your set-up is sub-optimal at best.
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Hey wait hold on, the part where you said 'host my blog on a url that I already own' I have done that already from a tutorial i saw somewhere where I update the record or something by putting my url.
I also have masking on my account?
Now I'm very lost -_-
Update: Okay I took off masking with my godaddy account and just did the second option you put which was update the records or something (I already had that).
-That's it! We've updated the DNS records, so your blog will now appear at . Thanks for being a Go Daddy customer! Will everything work fine now?
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Hi zmbatt,
URL masking is not an ideal solution for SEO as it masks the URL for subsequent pages of the site which can create perceived duplicate content. Here is an article with a little bit more on that.
http://webenso.com/domain-forwarding-seo/In your case, the ideal solution is to setup a custom domain for your Blogger.com blog. Here are the instructions on how to do that. Click "Host my blog on a URL that I already own" then click on "Yes" for the "hosted at GoDaddy" question.
http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1233381&page=ts.csDoing that will let you have individual URLs appear in the address bar. As for the canonical URL you were asking about, it is best practice to use them if you can. They are only essential if you have problems with duplicate content. Here is an article discussing how to set them up in Blogger.
http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2012/02/solve-problems-related-to-blogspot.htmlI hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew
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