Use the Canonical Tag for Duplicate Content

Use the Canonical Tag for Duplicate Content

If your site has duplicate content, then you will want to make use of the canonical tag says Matt Cutts. If you are publishing either the same or very similar content, you should make use of this so you do not have any issues with Google. Matt has stated that you can use duplicate content and it will not harm you or your site, unless you have made it known that you are in fact doing it for spamming purposes.

A canonical tag is code that the spiders will use when they crawl your page. This will tell the search engines what URL is the original version of your webpage. If you are still unfamiliar with them, here Matt Cutts goes more into depth of them:

This is great news to hear since there is about 25% content on the web that is indeed duplicate. Use of the canonical tag will ensure that the search engine knows what your primary page is.