Hey folks I have a product on my website that appears in 3 different categories but is the same product. the way OSCommerce is setup it has created 3 different URLs one for each category going to the same product. I am wondering if I have the canonical tag on my pages will this be considered as duplicate content or not as it is technically three different URLs with the same content. I have this problem with a bunch of products on my site ie. mydomain.com/cat1/product1 mydomain.com/cat2/product1 mydomain.com/cat5/product1 they all have the same content as it is all the same product but come up as duplicate content on my g crawler. Any expert input on this would be appreciated.
they are duplicate content. Using a canonical tag would tell the search engine which page/url is the primary one. If you dont specify, the search engine will choose one.
The <link rel="canonical"> element WILL fix it since this is exactly what it was designed for. However it will ONLY fix the problem for Google... Though MS, Yahoo! and Google announced support for the element when it first came out, the Google is the only one of the big 3 who has actually implemented support for it. The others are currently just ignoring the element.
camay123 I am confused now. Still trying to decide what to do?! Does anybody else wish to weigh in on this. Am I going to get penalized with the canonical element in place on all of my pages?
There IS no duplicate penalty - it's a duplicate filter, and as camay and canonical have said, the canonical tag was designed to resolve exactly this sort of situation.
Duplicate content is not a penalty, but using duplicate content your own site (2 or more pages with same content) is something that I will not suggest. Suggestion give by Canonical is the best option in this case and you must follow this.