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Monday, 3 March 2014

Canonical Tag – Canonical Link Element Best Practice

Google SEO – Matt Cutts from Google shares tips on the new rel=”canonical”
tag (more accurately – the canonical link element) that the 3 top search
engines now support. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have all agreed to work
together in a “joint effort to help reduce duplicate content for larger, more
complex sites and the result is the new Canonical Tag”.
Example Canonical Tag From Google Webmaster Central blog:
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />
You can put this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls, if
you think you need it.
I add a self-referring canonical link element as standard these days – to ANY
web page.
Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honour strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in
conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to
display in search results.
Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link
rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if
you include a<base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve
according to the base URL.
Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We
also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at
different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your
content. All of that is okay with us.
What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical,
but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.
What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a
designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately
reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.
Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will
then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.
What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly
recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure
optimal canonicalization results.

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