What is rel=”canonical” attribute?
In some situations, our few pages of our website contain very similar URL. For example, http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123 and if there is a provision of sorting a particular item in order of price, review etc then the URL become as follows …
Normal – http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123
By price – http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123?sort=price
By Rating – http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123?sort=rating
In this situation, all URLs are very identical and with similar contents, here canonical tag used to point the preferred version from these similar URLs. The rel=”canonical” attribute of the non-canonical version lets search engine to identify similar contents and display the most relevant page. This is very useful to protect your page rejected for having duplicate or similar content.
To specify a canonical URL, you need to specify it as follows ..
1 | <link rel="canonical" href= http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123”> |
Now just copy the above in the line to the section of all non-canonical pages like
http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123?sort=price
http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123?sort=rating
Now Google will identify all version of the page http://www.mysite.com/item_cat=123 as canonical and will calculate the most relevant page. However, sometime this canonical attribute varies search engine to search engine.
So, use the rel=”canonical” attribute only when you have different similar version of a same page. But remember, this canonical links will not effect for complete different domains like www.mysite.com, www.my-site.com or shopping.mysite.com.
Rather interesting. Has few times re-read for this purpose to remember. Thanks for interesting article. Waiting for trackback
It appears you forgot to paste the line in after “To specify a canonical URL, you need to specify it as follows ..”
Hi Chris, Thank you very much to cite the point. Actually the code was there and browser detecting that as raw code
Now updated.
Hi. Do you think it is wrong to do link building if there is still a canonical issue on the site.
Thanks.
Today I got to completely understand what is canonical tag.Its written in such a easy language.
Thanks a lot
Hi,Thanks for sharing this nice post with have a good info.