Duplicate Content due to GET parameters?

Marketing
1

A recent SEO scan of our website, carried out by The Netherlands most reputable SEO shop told me that we have some duplicate content:

e.g.

http://www.example.com/
and
http://www.example.com/?ref=maxtor

Now, I have no idea where Google got this ?ref=maxtor address from, we don’t publish it anywhere on our site and I cannot find any place it’s mentioned on the interwebs.

However, I find it hard to believe that Google would treat these two URLs as different pages containing identical content (as both URLs point to the same page).

Can anyone shed some light on this?

2

Use the Canonical link,
<link rel="canonical" href="URL HERE">

3

Thanks, that was the tip I needed. While reading up about canonicals, I found this page: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical

It explains that URLs with different GET parameters serving the same content are indeed often seen as duplicates instead of the same page.

4

While using canonical tag make sure to put it at the “starting of head tag” don’t put it in the body tag because google-bot just ignore this code if it is within the body tag.

5

Yeah, I put it in the header near the other seo-y tags :slight_smile:

6