Dealing with Google Blogger Duplicate Content and Canonical Issues
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Duplicate content and canonical issues can have a serious negative impact on your position in the search engine results pages. Google Blogger's (Blogspot's) templates in their default setups can lead to these issues. Keep reading to learn how to fix the problem.
You might have read one of these useful tips for implementing onsite SEO in Google Blogger:
This tutorial will further extend several important onsite SEO issues that were not covered or fully illustrated in those two previous tutorials.
Example of these important issues include canonical and duplicate content related problems in the Blogger template. This affects both the classic template and layouts on the new template. These issues will be covered in this tutorial.
How to Add a Link Rel Canonical Tag Using the Blogger Classic Template
This is tested to work only in classic templates, however the new XML template already incorporates the link rel canonical tag by default. This is a very important tag that will prevent duplicate content issues within your Google Blogger classic template.
Unfortunately, one cannot easily generate a link rel canonical tag to be pasted in your Google Blogger classic template source code. You need a strong working knowledge of Blogger conditional and scripting tags which might appear complex for an ordinary blogger.
Okay, let's not make this difficult for you. Here is the code:
1. First it will check to see if the page requested to the Blogger server is the front page or main page URL. If it is, it will return the link rel canonical tag HTML code containing the URL of your Blogger front page. So if your Blogspot has a front page URL of http://lwat.blogspot.com/, then it will be:
2. Next, if the requested URL to the Blogger server is NOT the front page, but instead a post URL, then it will return the blog post URL because of the use of the <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> tag.
3. There is no need to put the link rel canonical tag on the Blogger archived pages because those are non-indexable and already tagged with meta noindex to avoid duplicate content issues (refer to past onsite SEO tutorials on blogger; see reference links in the first section of this article).
How do we implement the link rel canonical code?
It is simple to implement. Follow the procedure below:
1. Log in to your Google Blogger account.
2. In the dashboard, click the "Template" link of your blog to be optimized.
3. Copy and paste this code (do not forget to change the URL to reflect your OWN Blogspot front page URL):
And place it just below the <head> tag of your template source code. After pasting it, the upper portion of your blogger template source code will look something like this (the red font is the link rel canonical script):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
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