Canonical Link Tag Wins The Day

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

The latest and greatest from the search engines – besides the fact that they’ve all put their heads together and agreed on one common tactic – is that canonical link tags are a necessity and they’ve settled on one protocol to help “clean up the Web.” Matt Cutts explains it here.

In a nutshell, you can now add the following syntax to your meta tags:

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.exampleurl.com/yepthisistheone.html”

What that will do is notify the search engines that a particular link URL is the correct URL to index and the tag comes in really handy when you have more than one page URL with the same content. The search engines will index the URL that you want indexed and it’s a way that you can control which page gets the traffic.

Here’s how you use the tag:

Let’s say you have content at http://thislocation.com/brandnewwebpage and your CMS produces a dynamic URL whenever that content is accessed from other pages on your site so that every time a user accesses the page it is done through a different URL. Just add the “canonical” link rel to the head section of your web page and that notifies the search engines of which content page is the page that you want indexed.

Yahoo! explains its take on the canonical link tag here. Microsoft Live’s explanation is here.

This appears to be a preferred method of dealing with canonical URL issues over 301 redirects because with a redirect your page load time will diminish and that affects your page quality score for PPC and well as your authority in terms of search engine optimization PageRank and visitor approval. With this tag in the head section of your HTML document, your page will load more quickly and you can notify the search engines of the best URL for your content. I think this is one of the most useful tags to come along in a long time.