What is Canonical URL Tag

[CalgaryRealtor39]

What is Canonical URL Tag?

[stevenmusumeche]

here's a great post from SEOmoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

[alhallinan]

Simply put, it's a tag that solves a problem.

Problem: Dynamic web pages get into trouble with duplicate content - Google will see a completely different page if the URL is changed in any way.

For instance, Google sees these as two different sites:

www.site.com 
www.site.com/

Just the trailing / will make Google index the page twice - which required much more resources to index all of that duplicate content.

So, the rel="canonical" tag exists to tell Google which version of the content to index - thus enabling less duplicate content.

All you need to do is add the rel="canonical" tag before the tag of your website, and you're good to go!

Does this help explain it?

[CalgaryRealtor39]

Yes it does thank you. When I run the campaign it says I have two on some pages and I need to remove them. ( I am using WordPress so I assume this was an automatic tag it added - odd) So I will try and remove it and see what happens at next crawl. THANKS

[alhallinan]

Not a problem!  If you come across any other problems, let me know, I'd love to help!