In response to literally dozens of customer requests, we’ve decided to help our fellow Magento users with an issue that even we had to overcome. After my first site crawl with SEOmoz, I found that our Magento CMS pages were appearing as duplicate content for every language and URL parameter allowed on my installation–108 pages of duplicate content!
Most SEO extensions add canonical URLs to product and category pages, but dare I say not one of them allows users to customize exactly how each canonical URL appears on each CMS page, individually. Hey, how many extensions even add canonical URLs to CMS pages?
Here’s a way to reduce duplicate content issues on Magento CMS pages without shelling out for an over-priced SEO extension. I posted this simple tutorial on Magento Wiki about how to implement the addLinkRel method in Magento CMS pages.
Choose the CMS page you’d like to add a canonical URL to. In the design tab, you’ll see the rarely utilized Layout Update XML textarea. Paste the following code into this textarea and save. Oh, and make sure to edit your URL. That should do it!
<reference name=”head”> <action method=”addLinkRel”> <rel>canonical</rel><href>http://magentoportico.com/about-us/</href> </action> </reference>Now go check the head section of your Magento site and look for the canonical link tag. Don’t forget that you’ll have to update these URLs in your sitemap manually.
