Beginner - needs to better understand rel=canonical. What is the best resource?

[JonnyBird1]

I'm pretty sure I have pages/posts that are competing on the same keyword and would like to fix it. What is the best beginners guide to understanding rel=canonical and how to use it to improve our SEO?

[William.Lau]

Please visit this page from Google:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

rel=canonical just means that http://www.example.com/widget/searching=page2 - will have a canonical tag to http://www.example.com/widget. That way link juice and indexing will not be split between the duplicate pages. That way the original /widget link is more authoritative.

[JonnyBird1]

Great. I'm watching the video and understand it well. How do I find whether my pages need it?

[William.Lau]

This will be entirely up to you. If you believe you need it or not.

Usually it is for cases when you have multiple pages within a section/category. For example you have shoppingsite.com/widgets. There will be  shoppingsite.com/widgets/search&page2. You want to put the canonical tag on page2 to point to widgets URL.

[Linda-Vassily]

They need it if they are exact duplicates or highly similar. It is not used for pages that just have the same keyword but are otherwise different.