Blog

Posted by mariam.shariff on February 18th, 2009

Don’t blame me if you’re having trouble with the word, that’s what it’s known as by Google! Canonical URL simply means a prettier, neater friendlier version of a URL preferred by you!

Sometimes the same web page can be accessed through multiple URLs and this can be mistaken by search engines to be “duplicate content”.  

That’s why Google, Yahoo and MSN, the 3 biggies have come together to resolve the common issue of such duplicate content on a website. This can  sometimes be caused when you don’t have control over your content management system or due to dynamically generated URLs or even because both www vs non www versions exist for a domain!  

By simply including a one line page level ‘link’ tag in the header section of an html document you could specify to search engines which URL you prefer.  

Say you had a webpage that could be reached by both,

www.canonical-url.com and

www.canonical-url.com/ merchant.php?item=clothes-trousers 

Even though both these URLs point to the same webpage (“hypothetically speaking”), technically they are both different.  

By simply adding the page tag in the header section of the html document you will be telling the search engine which URL is preferred hence giving you complete control over the URL that is displayed in the search results and saving you the hassle of several internal 301s.  

This standard is only applicable within a domain or sub domains but not between two different domains.  

This wonderfully simple piece of code tells a crawler that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL while at the same time transferring all the Page Rank and linking properties over to the preferred URL.  

What more can we SEOs ask for! If only…

Mariam Shariff
Studio 2 Online
Search Engine Optimisation, Leicester