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—

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?