Most webmasters have a taste of  ‘duplicate dragon’  at some point of time – Many times with serious consequences. While cross-domain duplicate content is handled pretty well with ‘301′ or ‘302′ ,  intra-domain & sub-domain duplicate content are left to Search engine’s whims.

A pretty simple solutions is at hand for webmasters  in directing the search engines to index  the preferred page.

Say, for example, Brad has a website – www.bradsdogcare.com

1. It has  3 pages :
   

• www.shepherd.com/dog-care.htm
  
• www.retriever.com/dog-care.htm
• www.terrier.com/dog-care.htm

The content for all the 3 pages are almost similar because of the size of the breeds – The only difference being the image in different pages.

But, Brad wants only the Shepherd page to be indexed…So what does he do?

He uses the rel = “canonical” attribute in the head section of the non-preferred pages , i.e. retriever & terrier pages

1. <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.retriever.com/dog-care.htm“/>
2. <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.terrier.com/dog-care.htm“/>

Image Credit: zealousweb.net