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SEO: Interesting duplicated content when using tabbed navigation...

Answer 1

+1 A:

Could always just redirect from /article_id/ to /article_id/first_tab/ automatically, so that the tab name is always included.

The other option is to put the tab name in the url hash (the part that starts with a #) instead of the actual URL itself - so you'd get something like this:

/article_id/#first_tab

JavaScript can access this via location.hash.

Since the hash portion of a URL isn't counted by search engines as "part of the URL", they realize that it's all the same page.

Amber 2010-07-06 02:48:06

I think I will can change the first tab anchor href to point to the original /article_id/ (same page) and change the javascript code to detect this and get the first tab data if no tab is detected...

Jonathan 2010-07-06 03:21:16

Answer 2

+1 A:

Hey Jonathan, I would recommend that you use the <link rel='canonical'> tag to solve this problem. It was created by the search engines (google, yahoo, microsoft bing) to solve this specific problem, and it is pretty darn easy to implement. Simply use the tag like this on your page:

<html>
   <head>
      <link rel="canonical" href="http://website.com/article_id/" />
   </head>
</html>

Google and the other search engines will see this within your page, and will treat it like a 301 Redirect from your duplicate URL (website.com/article_id/first_tab) to the canonical URL (website.com/article_id/). This is good, it means that the search engine will now count all high-quality links pointing to your duplicate URL when calculating the reputation of your canonical URL (this doesn't happen with the hash-tag solution recommended by Amber.

While the canonical tag is great, it is only a 90% solution, in that you can still run into issues with your web analytics with all the extra duplicate URLs on your website. The best solution would be Amber's first recommendation, which is to do the 301 redirect yourself. However, this can be a prohibitive amount of work for that extra 10% gain, so many people prefer to start with the canonical tag.

For more information about the canonical tag, checkout google's writeup: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Nathan Buggia 2010-07-06 03:33:57

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SEO: Interesting duplicated content when using tabbed navigation...

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