This is search engine optimization tip number twenty eight in our continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All our search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with the new canonical tag that has recently been endorsed by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, the three major search engines.
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A while back you might recall that we talked about fixing duplicate content on your website and how duplicate content can have a direct impact on your website’s ability to rank well in the search engines. The new canonical tag is a new effort by the search engines to help us fix duplicate content on our websites.
What does the Canonical Tag do?
The canonical tag lets us tell the search engines that a specific URL is a duplicate of another URL, another web page on your website. This is important because it’s not advantageous for a search engine to crawl and index pages on your website that are duplicates of other web pages. The fact is, having several pages indexed with identical or very similar content will probably harm your search engine rankings–or at least make it more difficult for those web pages to rank well in the search engines. It’s also extremely annoying for users to click on multiple search results only to end up on web pages with the same content.
By telling the search engines of a canonical relationship to a page using the canonical tag, we tell the search engines not to index a certain web page, because it’s really the same as another web page. We’re also informing the search engine that the other page is the one to use for calculating rank.
How to Implement the Canonical Tag
Implementing the canonical tag is pretty easy, at least in technical technically. In many cases, it may be more difficult to determine where duplicate web pages on your site exist and which page you really want indexed and which URLs you want the search engines to ignore. If you’re having trouble with this, feel free to contact us and we can certainly point you in the right direction. You may also want to look back at our fix duplicate content blog post as a reference, as well.
Matt Cutts explains the canonical tag like this:
The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:There also is a good video that was done with Matt Cutts and Web Pro News regarding the canonical tag that you might want to view, as well. Also, take a look at the Google help topic on the canonical tag.That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .
The bottom line is that this new canonical tag can be helpful. But, keep in mind that I highly recommend that you do everything possible to remove the duplicate content on your web site before you resort to using the canonical tag.
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