Canonical Link for Duplicate Content

[kchandler]

A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example:

Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source

Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs:

But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther?

Thanks - Kyle Chandler

[wissamdandan]

Hi Kyle,

I think your kinda misunderstood canonical tags,(being on the base pages)

what basically what is going to happen when SE spider comes to http://www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source, the canonical tag will tell them, that http://www.domain.com/page.html is the original page.

and its not an issue if it resided in the base pages. and basically it's a very good solution with your client problem

[kchandler]

By using the canonical link will it begin to pull the tracking queries out of the ranking or at least discredit them?

[wissamdandan]

Yes,

it might take time to get removed from search, but crediting the base page will start with the first crawl after implementing