This post describes you about rel=canonical tag. This is for SEO newbies and webmaster who are not aware of this tag. We will tell you how and where use this tag. Canonical is derived from word Canon which means “Rule”. This tag is used on dynamic websites where one page can be accessed from more than one URL. This canonical URL tag is used to improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures or via syndication.
For example you have shopping website where you have multple URLs for product detail page.
Example
http://example.org/product/toy-car.html
http://example.org/?products=toy+car
So at this moment your website is serving 2 different URLs for same product page. In this case search engines will treat these page as duplicate content page and none of these will rank in search engines for any keyword search.
For the above case search engines suggest to use rel=canonical tag in webpages.
How to Use canonical tag in webpages
Add the following tag in your webpages <head> </head> section.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.org/product/toy-car.html” />
Always use the exact URL of any webpage, which you want to index in search engines. So in all dynamic product pages for this partcular product same canonical tag and value will be shown. You can check this tag by viewing source code of webpage. We will eloborate this with one more example.
Suppose you have 3 diffrent URls of a webpage
http://example.org/?product=toy+car
http://example.org/product/tab/toycar.aspx
http://example.org/product/toy-car.html
Now you have to implement only one URL in the above 3 pages. So whenever you will access any of the above URL only one URL will be displayed in rel=canonical tag.
You can use the canonical checker by Sitechecker to check the canonical tags of an HTML web page on
your or another website.
Please ask anything related to rel=canonical tag in comment section below.