What does Canonical mean?

[ge0173400]

Hi,

I was wondering what is meant by canonical? I ran a test on my site and in the notices, SEOMOZ came back with a total of 90 canonicals. As far as I can tell, it refers to the preferred page (not really sure what that means though). I thought initially it was talking about duplicate content, but all the pages are totally different. There is no duplicate content on any of he pages that it lists. So I'm not sure how to fix this.

Thanks for the help.

Don

[David_ODonnell]

Straight from the horses mouth:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

[Michael-Goode]

Good day ge0173400,

Basically canonical was created to tell Google that if you 2 or more pages that have the same content, which page with that content you want Google to focus on.

For example you have 3 pages regarding gold fish. All 3 pages have nearly the exact same content except the species of gold fish. All of a sudden you have duplicate content now. It is then up to you to decide which page you would like to get the most value (let's say page 1). You then put a canonical link on pages 2 & 3 pointing to page 1. This means that when Google crawls pages 2 & 3 it will find out that it should focus on page 1.

If the above is confusing, definitely have a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps It does a great (and better) job of explaining canonical.

Best of luck.

[duoweb]

Just as Broadbeach Media said is the canonical tag to indicate pages with similar content. Big advantage is that you can tell Google which one is the important one and needs to be indexed.

More detailled info you can find here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

[ge0173400]

Thanks Guys,

Really appreciate your input.

Don