Google, together with Yahoo and Microsoft have just announced a new tag, canonical link, which can be used to publicly tell search engines your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, canonical link provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that the properties of a web page such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred URL.
Duplicate Content Issue
You probably don’t understand what it is now. Don’t worry, it’s best to explain it with an example. Here we goes.
Imagine you have a blog post with the following URL:
http://www.bloghighlight.com/high-google-ranking-with-internal-linking/But sometimes you’d like to publish the URL on the Twitter with some tagging so that you can analyze your traffic in Google Analytics reports. So your published URL on Twitter would look like this:
http://www.bloghighlight.com/high-google-ranking-with-internal-linking/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitterWithout the canonical link, you’d have duplicate content issue in the eyes of search engines. You have exactly same content under both URLs but indexed under 2 different URLs in the search engines. This is an issue in SEO that people have been trying to solve for ages without any perfect solution.
Now with the introduction of new tag, canonical link, search engines such as Google will understand that the duplicate contents are all referred to the canonical URL.
Canonical Link Snytax And Example
Below is the syntax of canonical URL tag. It must be placed in the <head> section of a web page.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.bloghighlight.com/high-google-ranking-with-internal-linking/"/>Google will understand that all the duplicate contents refer to the canonical URL: http://www.bloghighlight.com/high-google-ranking-with-internal-linking/. Additionally, PageRank and related properties are not separated across different duplicate URL, all are transferred to your canonical link as well.
No Duplicate Content WordPress Plugin
With the launch of this new canonical link tag, I’ve written a Wordpress plugin to automatically add canonical link tag to your WordPress <head> section for all your blog posts and pages.
Conclusion
Canonical link is a very powerful tag to solve SEO duplicate content issue. This standard is adopted by any search engine when crawling and indexing your site. Google will use it most of the time, 99% to be exact.
Just try my new plugin and do let me know if you have any issue or question.
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