How to Specify Preferred URL to Index in Sitemap

[lbohen]

In that we have duplicate audio book descriptions (author bio, story, praise...) for titles offered in more than one format (abridged, unabridged, compact disc, MP3 CD) I want to minimize the amount of "duplication" a search engine spider sees. Search Engine Watch says "One of the easiest ways to guarantee that you determine which copies of your content you want Google, Yahoo or Bing to index (if multiple versions exist on your site) is to specify the preferred URL version of the content in your sitemaps. This will ensure you control which version of the content you want search engines in general to index."

How do I specify preferred URLs in our sitemaps?

[lbohen]

I am "replying" to my original post in hopes that someone out there has an answer.

We are still striving to recover from Panda and have recently been told that duplicate content is a huge contributor to our plummet in ranking for generic keywords such as "audiobook," "audiobooks," "audio book," and "audio books."

[Jim]

Have you done a web search on the topic? I googled preferred url and got a number of hits. This one from google
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 talks about rel="canonical" which is added the the head section of pages with similar content and points the the preferred page to be indexed.

You could probably use a custom field to contain something to indicate if the page is the main one or not and another field to indicate the preferred page. Then in your template you could check those to fields and if it is the preferred page don't out put the preferred rel="cannonical" link and if it is not the preferred page output the link with the rel="canonical".

There may be other things you could do also. Check google, bing etc. forums and see if there are other suggestions.