{"id":82,"date":"2010-02-03T10:40:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T10:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/productcart-com.web7.netsourceinc.com\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/02\/03\/e-commerce-stores-duplicate-content-and-canonical-urls\/"},"modified":"2010-02-03T10:40:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T10:40:00","slug":"e-commerce-stores-duplicate-content-and-canonical-urls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/2010\/02\/03\/e-commerce-stores-duplicate-content-and-canonical-urls\/","title":{"rendered":"E-commerce stores, duplicate content, and Canonical URLs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At times we see ProductCart users send us messages or post on the ProductCart forms about concerns with duplicate content. In a nutshell, they are worried that having two links to the same page would damage their search engine rankings due to some sort of &#8220;duplicate content penalty&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s clarify this topic &#8211; as much as we can. This actually applies not just to ProductCart, but to any other e-commerce store (or any Web site, for that matter).<\/p>\n<p><b>Duplicate Content<\/b><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com\/2008\/09\/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html\">Google has made it pretty clear<\/a> that unless you&#8217;re doing something shady, there is pretty much nothing to worry about (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.earlyimpact.com\/forum\/forum_posts.asp?TID=2879&amp;KW=duplicate+content&amp;PID=12166#12166\">see this forum posting by our staff<\/a>). Done with this one. Hey, that was quick!<\/p>\n<p><b>Canonical URLs<\/b><br \/>\nPretty fancy name, but simple concept. You tell the world what the preferred URL of a given page is. That way, you make it even more clear to any search engine that you don&#8217;t want to trick anyone. If there are other URLs that point to the same page, that&#8217;s fine. You made it clear what the preferred one is ( = the one that should be indexed).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com\/2009\/02\/specify-your-canonical.html\">Google Webmaster Blog article on this topic<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.earlyimpact.com\/productcart\/seo-canonical\">Automatically adding Canonical URLs to your product and category pages (BETA)<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Conclusion<\/b><br \/>\nWhenever you can help search engines more effectively index your Web site (e.g. generating a sitemap), it&#8217;s a good idea to do so. In this case, regardless of whether or not a &#8220;duplicate content penalty&#8221; exists (as mentioned above, in most cases it does not), it is a good idea to <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.earlyimpact.com\/productcart\/seo-canonical\">add a Canonical URL to your store pages<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At times we see ProductCart users send us messages or post on the ProductCart forms about concerns with duplicate content. In a nutshell, they are worried that having two links to the same page would damage their search engine rankings due to some sort of &#8220;duplicate content penalty&#8221;. Let&#8217;s clarify this topic &#8211; as much [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.productcart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}