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**diecastfast** · 04-08-09, 11:57 AM

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Originally posted by Pete McNamara View Post

As far as I can see in this thread, no-one is claiming that Google penalizes you for duplicate content on your own site. You penalize yourself. How? By wasting link juice (I hate that term but since gmanning used it, I will follow his/her example). gmanning covered the waste of external link juice but it is the internal link juice that is wasted that penalizes you the most.

Despite all the "Matt Cutts says" past posts in this forum about internal duplicate pages and Google penalties, (and as I have pointed out on many occasions in respect of this particular issue, it was what Matt Cutts wasn't saying that was more important rather than what he actually said) Google was sufficiently concerned about the "non existent" problem that it has created the new canonical tag.

This is a great solution for sites with dynamically generated pages albeit not so good news for my SEO clients who were making hay while the "non existent" problem existed.

Interesting concept, Pete! That has me rethinking the neccesity of the canonical tags! That being the case, I re-read this blog post and have a question: Four steps are listed;

Login to your store admin
Under your store name click on Pages
Click edit next to CTGY (search if needed)
Locate the line:
Paste the code below after the line above:

Notice that step four does not identify the line where the code needs to be pasted below. Help anyone?

**Pete McNamara** · 04-08-09, 03:18 PM

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Mark made that blogpost early i.e just a couple of weeks after the tag was announced. We've since had another 3 weeks to think about the tag and at this time, I don't see the necessity to put it on the CTGY Page template. I agree with Steve Strickland - it seems for Miva stores it is only necessary in the PROD Page template.

As to it's location, it just needs to be between the <head> tags in that page template e.g.

Code:

<head>
	<title>&mvt:store:name;: &mvt:product:name;</title>

Canonical tag goes here

	<base href="&mvt:global:basehref;">
	<mvt:item name="prodctgy_meta" param="prod" />
	<mvt:item name="head" param="head_tag" />
</head>

Note that the canonical tag is not necessary if all your links to a particular product or category page are identical. i.e. if you have not included the category code in a link to a product, so all links to any single product are identical. So, a product could be in 1000 categories but the link from each category to that product, would be identical. Under such circumstances it is unnecessary.

There are some downsides to not including the category code in the link to a product page - you cannot have a "Return to Category" button on the product page and it makes tracking the source of sales slightly more difficult (although still easy, with the use of tracking funnels in metrics software e.g. Google Analytics). This has been a small price to pay over the past 3 years compared to the SEO advantages. However, now the canonical tag exists, it seems category codes can be included in the links to product pages.

I am not going to rush out and add them though, for two reasons:

1. I want to be certain that there are no ill effects and a few months delay in adding them won't cause any material adverse affect to my clients

2. I have to jump a mental hurdle - when a light switch in your office has given you an electric shock each time you have turned it on over the past 3 years and now the electrician advises me that the problem is fixed, I am going to have difficulty being one of the first to turn it on. :)

**Biffy** · 04-09-09, 05:51 AM

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Pete, I agree that it's not necessary for internal links. We've already found excellent methods to eliminate the problem using SEO Links and Toolkit scripts to recapture the category code on PROD.

I do favor canonical links over htaccess for eliminating the problem with legacy backlinks when a store is converted to SEO Links.

I also think canonical links might be a solution for folks who don't know scripting.

**Mark Simon** · 04-09-09, 12:19 PM

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

diecastfast,

I updated the blog post, there is a special tag to wrap around html code for it to display properly on the blog that I left out.

http://blog.mivamerchant.com/46/sett...product-pages/

As to whether the canonical URL is necessary or helpful I have not been able to tell definitively if it helps with duplicate content or not. I do implement it since all the search engines suggest you do and I am monitoring webmaster tools to see if it actually starts to group some of the URLs.

Cheers,

**papi34** · 04-28-09, 06:54 PM

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

I finally got around to adding a canonical link within the head tags of my PROD page. So my question is...should I now remove all the entries in my robots.txt file that were disallowing google from crawling certain categories (i.e. categories that led to duplicate content)?

**morditech.com** · 04-28-09, 07:26 PM

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Good question. Taking the links out of the robots.txt could only help you so I suggest removing them. The reason (I think) it would help is becuase there may be links on the Internet someplace that point to these URL's that you have disallowed in the robots file and you never get the credit for them. With the canonical elements if someone points to a duplicate content file your main file will get credit for it. That really is my opinion but from what I understand your canonical URL will get credit for any links that are pointed to the duplicate content pages. If anyone else finds holes in this theory please shoot me down.

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