Many people over the years (ourselves included) have been using 301’s to redirect pages with duplicate page content.
Introducing a canonical link
Although these have been around for a couple of years now they are only now being taken seriously by search engines. Inserting the following link on the duplicated page tells the search engine (and only the search engine) that this is a duplicate page and redirects it to the original article.
<link rel=”canonical” href=” http://www.originalpage.co.uk ” />
One example of when to use this is if you have a blog post that you have promoted to your news section on your main site. This may show up in search engines as duplicate content on your site, thus penalising you from getting higher search rankings on the original post.
This can also be used across different domains so you can credit the original author, so that they benefit from any SEO.
This small tag that sits in the “head” tag of your page and helps with some SEO problems.