2 canonical links on 1 page, 1 for print version

[foodsleuth]

Our developer has added a 2nd canonoical link for the "print" version of our page.   I read on another post that this appears to be not be the correct way to do this.  Is there a better way ?  Here is an example of the code:

[GPainter]

Hello,

you only need one tag pointing towards to main page so on all duplicates you would have the following (the same) tag

assuming http://xxx.xxxxxx.com/recipes/winter-creme-fraiche-baked-potato-soup is the original

What the tag does is tell Google "this is a duplicate but you can find the original here" Google will then ignore that page (not rank) it.

Hope that helps and its clear. More info can be found here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

[foodsleuth]

I guess this is confusing because there is one page (the recipe) and that page just gets rendered with a different style sheet if a user wants to print it out, but this DOES create a different URL.

So you are saying, as long as we put this on the recipe page:

That when the style sheet renders that page as :

http://xxx.xxxxxx.com/recipes/**print/**winter-creme-fraiche-baked-potato-soup
it will include the canonical link back to the recipe page?

[GPainter]

If we look at this a different way, the style sheet may make it look different but the content is the same, so you don't really need two of the same content indexed.  This only affects the robots so a user wouldn't see a difference and could still access the printer friendly version, presumably you would have a link to the printer version on the original and so that's why its good for the original.

So to clarify - If you have the same content across multiple pages you want to select one page as the original and link back to that page via the tag in all of the duplicates.

I hope that helps clear it up for you.

[JCurrier]

I'm pretty sure if you just chop off the last tag, , you are going to be perfectly fine.

There should be one canonical tag and it should point to the URL of the original document or the version that you want search engines to view as the main document.