SEOMatrix LLC Blog: Your Daily Ethical Search Engine Marketing Treats

…the ostensible reason for me not to expound on the term “canonicalization” is because Matt Cutts did a pretty decent job of it on his own, and wikipedia lends a hand as well. One area I wish to stress is the duplicate content issue as it relates to canonicalized urls. Using FTP clients I occassionally forget what an actual or intended home page url is – sometimes I upload index.htm files or index.html files without really giving it a second thought. I’ve also seen more than a few occassions where a given website has had up to six home pages saved on a server’s root directory- good for backup purposes in case of a hungry hi-tech gremlin — bad for search marketing and especially Googlebot — my recommendation is to perform a periodic scan of the root directory to see if there aren’t any duplicate home pages (or sub level pages for that matter) that may have been unitentionally saved with a different extension or page name. Google’s algorithm seems to be limiting the ranking possibilities of sites where they even suspect duplicate content to exist — a precaution well worth the time investment.