Not only can duplicated content make it difficult for search engines to index your web pages properly, but it can lead to penalties that could dramatically effect a website’s ability to rank well for targeted keyphrases in the major search engines.

As websites grow-up, the potential for duplicate content increases. Sites that contain a lot of content might have a variety of different URLs that all reference the same location. This issue can often impact smaller websites that show up in search engine results with and without the ‘www’ in front of the corresponding URL.

An Open Standard Solution Supported by Google – Yahoo! – and Microsoft

Even though Google Webmaster Tools has an option to select the ‘www’ preference for the URLs of your website, a tactic with more control that is acceptable for other search engines was needed. The canonical link element was developed to help search engines determine the preferred URL to be used for your website.

When linking to pages of your site or blog, utilize the canonical link element in the header portion of your links.

Here’s the canonical link element in action:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

This tells the search engines that the prefferred URL is http://example.com/page.html (note: without the ‘www’). Where canonical = preferred.

Additional Information

Video clip of Google’s Matt Cutts explaining the link element…

10 Magnanimous SEO Tips

1. Black hat strategies are hit and miss, not to mention loaded with potential risk. Even if you know what you are doing.
2. Grey hat strategies are often questionable. However, knowing about Black and Grey hat strategy strengths and weaknesses will drastically improve your optimization capabilities. It’s important to note that a White hat tactic can be classified Black just as easy as the other way around. It’s all relative to current search engine ranking criteria.
3. Links with the “nofollow” tag attribute are only useless in terms of backlink credit from Google; many other search engines ignore this tag.
4. Focus on individual web pages versus the entire site; the bulk majority of your traffic will typically be derived from just a few pages.
5. In regard to focusing on keyphrases; keep it short, but sweet. Duplicating keywords/phrases and targeting a bunch will do more harm than good. Think of it more like creating a ‘theme’ for a web page that targets a particular set of words or phrases.
6. Search engines typically have 1,000 results (100 pages) that are returned after a search is performed, despite the number of results that are displayed immediately after preforming a search. The top 5 positions get the most traffic, and most searchers do not often go past the 2nd page of results.
7. Ideally, you want to optimize a site for search engines before it has been designed/developed. This will allow for maximization of SEO potential.
8. A backlink from the Yahoo! Link Directory and DMOZ is worth more than approximately 100-200 backlinks from typical free submission directories.
9. SEO audits and analysis must always come first. Targeting is VERY important.
10. Using Google Webmaster Tools to submit xml sitemaps can speed up re-indexing time. This is also where you can find out if your website has incurred any penalties.

Always remember – content is king, and ‘don’t be evil’. You’d be surprised at how good the Search Engines treat websites and blogs that follow these two simple principles.