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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 ..

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.