Duplicate content is having identical content on two or more pages on your site and it can harm your website rankings; here I will discuss how you can cope up with this to boost your ranking in Google.
The most common problem - www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.html
These two pages are having same content but are duplicate content in Google eyes, which affects page rankings and Google PageRank of page as page strength is divided into two pages.
Solution for Duplicate content €" New Canonical URL Link Tag
To solve duplicate content problem Google has provided this canonical tag which webmaster are required to put in the HEAD section of the website page.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/correct-page.html" />
Replace www.mydomain.com/correct-page.html with your real web page address.
Remember it is placed in the HTML headers in order to notify the search engines about thebest URL for the particular page. Using the canonical in your pages is something very useful and it can help you reduce drastically the amount of duplicate content within your site. Additionally it is a great way to pass the link juice that is lost to the duplicates back to the canonical pages and this tag will tell Google the official and correct page for index and will avoid duplicate content problem.
