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What does the CANONICAL tag mean?

by kris486
1 replies
  • SEO
    • |
HI to all ,

I want to know what is canonical tag? and what are the purpose of these tags...if anyone know then please let me know.....
#canonical #tag
  • Profile picture of the author clickbump
    Excellent question. In a nutshell, it allows you to provide a tag at in the head section of your page that tells Google and other search agents, the default URL that should be applied to the page.

    First, for some background on why the canonical url metatag is needed. Here's a summary from Matt Cutts that explains what a "canonical" url is before the advent usage of the canonical url metatag...

    Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
    A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

    www[dot]example.com
    example.com/
    www[dot]example.com/index.html
    example.com/home.asp

    But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

    Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
    A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to example[dot]com/ and the other half go to www[dot]example.com/ Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.
    And now, fast forward a few years, and here's Google's updated answer to the above issue.

    A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

    It's common for a site to have several pages listing the same set of products. For example, one page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. For example:

    site.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=alpha

    site.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price

    If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. Our algorithms select the page we think best answers the user's query. Now, however, users can specify a canonical page to search engines by adding a <link> element with the attribute rel="canonical" to the <head> section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google: "Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results."

    How do I specify a canonical page?

    To specify a canonical link to the page site.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, create a <link> element as follows:

    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.site.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

    Copy this link into the <head> section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as site.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price[/url].

    If you publish content on both http and https for the url: site.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, you can specify the canonical version of the page. Create the <link> element:

    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>
    Add this link to the <head> section of site.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish.

    Read More Here > About rel="canonical" - Webmaster Tools Help

    And Here > SEO advice: url canonicalization
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