Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
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A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example:
Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=sourceNow both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs:
But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther?
Thanks - Kyle Chandler
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Yes,
it might take time to get removed from search, but crediting the base page will start with the first crawl after implementing
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By using the canonical link will it begin to pull the tracking queries out of the ranking or at least discredit them?
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Hi Kyle,
I think your kinda misunderstood canonical tags,(being on the base pages)
what basically what is going to happen when SE spider comes to http://www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source, the canonical tag will tell them, that http://www.domain.com/page.html is the original page.
and its not an issue if it resided in the base pages. and basically it's a very good solution with your client problem
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