Whenever your
website is having trouble in ranking because of duplication what comes in your
mind is how I remove this duplication. One of the best and very popular ways is
using canonical tag.
How to use canonical tag
URL
normalisation is the process of transforming a URL into normalised or canonical URL. By this you can help search engine to reduce duplicate page indexing. The canonical tag helps webmasters make clear to the search
engines which page is the original one.You may have different URLs all pointing
to the same page.
For example
a) www.yourdomainname.com/page-id=123?/size12/~dyn987The content of this page is also available on the following page: b) www.yourdomainname.com/page/123/size12/type987
It will cause you duplicate content issues and affect your rankings.This can be easily corrected by using the
Canonical Link Element
URL (a) is unfriendly URL to search engine and (b) is friendly.You have double content. Two different URL's but with the same content. One links to (a) and the other links to (b). This is where you leak PageRank.
The page mentioned in the canonical link will be indexed in the database of the search engines.
Why should you use canonical tag?
By adding the
canonical tag you inform the search engine which page is the main page if
you have double content.The rel=canonical passes the same amount of link juice
as a 301 redirect, and takes up much less development time to implement.
Where should you add canonical tag?
The
canonical link element is goes between the head tags.
<head>
<title>Your Page</title>
<link rel=’canonical’
href=’http://
www.yourdomainname.com/page/123/size12/type987/>
</head>
You may add canonical meta tag to all of
your webpages.
