What is Canonical Tag? Google, Yahoo and Microsoft explain
What exactly is the Canonical Tag? Well me explain.
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced today a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content. Well, as you may already knew, duplicate contents has caused major headaches for search engines. These three major search engines came together, a rare get together, to allow users to point out their preferred version of a URL.
Here’s a senario. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site and blogging platform such as Wordpress, always creates with several URLs for each page. This makes it difficult for search engines to crawl. Well, many websites are penalized by the search engines from time to time for creating too many duplicate content.
Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />
All you need to do for any links in your new content that you are creating in the future, simply add this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content URLs.
The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all URLs will be directed to the one preferred url.
Still need more information to understand better? Each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements. Just go to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
Watch the video below if you don’t like to read.
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