One of my clients has a number of pages with duplicate content throughout their site. I was in the process of setting up redirects and noindex tags on certain pages but Google has just announced a new method.

Rel=”canonical” is a new method that allows you to add the page you want Google to associate the duplicate page with, resulting in only one of the pages being indexed. This will be useful for pages with tracking parameters within the URL but my main concern is what happens with the links pointing to the page? If someone links to the duplicate page does Google pass that link equity onto the required landing page? If not then i think 301 redirects are going to be the better option. I’m going to run some tests on this and keep an eye on the blogs to see if this is answered but if anyone knows please add a comment.

— This also works with Yahoo and MSN—

A funny post i found somewhere, thought i would share it!

If you look here you can see that a glitch in Google maps street view shows a strange black hole in Clarksville Maryland.

Google Black Hole

What will Google find next!!

Google launched a new product today called Google Latitude. The basic concept of this new service first gave me the creeps and the words ‘big brother is watching you’ came to mind, and that’s something that i have never said before even though i know it exists and i use more or less ever Google tool.

The basic concept of Latitude it that you tell it where you are or you let it detect you through you internet or mobile connection and it shows your location on Google maps to your friends. Scared at first at the possible issues surrounding this i felt i had to play with it and test it before i began claiming how bad this idea is. So i went home and spent a bit of time playing with it and connecting to a friend to see what it can do.

My first fear of people knowing exactly were i am went away very quickly. I have the option to add a postcode or address, thus telling it where i am or i can let it find me through my phone location or computer. There are security features to, so you don’t need to let everyone see where you are and you can hide you location from certain people as and when. So the possibility of a jealous boyfriend or girlfriend stalking you are pretty slim.

So with the main issue of security being pretty much solved through telling it to hide me or not show me to certain people i began to wonder why would i use it? The main benefit i could think of is when a friend or i go travelling and we want our friends to know where we are, but that might not work – I mean if i don’t have a constant internet connection or spend a fortune on my mobile then it will only show my friends where i was LAST! So they can keep track of me when i manage to get to a computer – maybe offering a bit of security for travellers and will help if anyone goes missing, maybe an add on product could offer the constant signal through GPS.

There are a few other benefits to it – a lost friend trying to meet you somewhere, turns it on through their phone and you can direct them very easily. The same goes from a company view point, someone trying to find the office they can turn it on accept you as a friend and there you are.

The more I thought about this product the more opportunity i feel it has and the more it can really benefit it’s users. My initial security issues proved to be unfounded and the opportunities to friends and businesses prove to be pretty extensive. Like many of these products the only limitation is your imagination.

The one thing i still think it can do for Google is allow them to test a far more effective localised/personalised search option. For instance, Google now knows where you are, it knows your search behaviour so what’s stopping it from telling you that there are 3 pubs, 2 petrol stations and that sex shop you search for yesterday within two minutes from your current location? My view is that this is ultimately where this will go but for now it is still a handy tool to have in the Google arsenal.

Something i’ve wondered for a while but never really looked into it. The homepage of a Wordpress template shows the content of a post and then offers the link to an individual post page, so my first thought is duplicate content.

So i’ve always created my posts as excerpts then link it to the main post. I’m still thinking this is the best approach as anyone deciding to link to a post will then definately link to the actual post instead of the homepage which will eventually lose that post as new ones push it down.

Looking at a number of different wordpress blogs in Google i can see that even if the homepage does have the entire post on it it tends to be the post page that ranks – which makes sense as the post page will be optimised for the specific search terms (titles, headers, content etc)

No i’m still torn between the excerpt idea and the full text, but i’ve decided to take a usability approach on this – basically i prefer reading all new posts from a single page without having to click back and forth and as Google seems to be ranking the actual post page anyway i’m going to take this approach from now on.

What’s your views on this?