X-Cart Canonical: The answer to your x-cart seo duplicate content worries

Duplicate content worry is an issue we hear about daily from x-cart owners concerned about their x-cart seo rankings, so imagine my excitement this morning when I woke up and found that google has released a solution to alleviate these worries.

Its important to note first that duplicate content is something people tend to worry about more than they need to, and that its ability to impact your search results negatively are highly over-estimated. What tends to happen when two pages share the same content, is that one is selected to rank high in google while the other is pushed towards the bottom. This is only a significant problem when search engines give weight to the wrong url. While distinguishing the correct url is something search engines - particularily Google - is very good at, clearly they hear about duplicate content concerns a great deal, resulting in the birth of the new canonical tag - a combined effort between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google's new canonical tag allows you to specify the page url you want to be given indexing priority. If for example you have the following pages:

http://www.example.com/page.php
http://www.example.com/page.php?sort=asc
http://www.example.com/page.php?sort=desc

You can now modify these pages to include the new 'canonical' tag as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page.php" />

We will be adapting our x-cart seo Custom Dynamic Search Engine (CDSEO) Pro module for catonical support shortly.