Using Canonical Attribute

[Creditsafe]

Hi All,

I am hoping you can help me?

We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag.

So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work?

I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble.

Thank you in advance

[GPainter]

Hell,

first off here is some help - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

the way it works is lets say you've got two bits of content on two different areas of a site but it will only index one (and mark other as a duplicate) Example :

www.books.com/author

&

www.books.com/genre/author

Now these may be the same  content, what we would then do is put a canonical tag  on the duplicate  page pointing to the page we wanted to be indexed ( I would recommend using one thats closer to the domain) so on www.books.com/genre/author we would put the tag -

What this does it tells Google this page is a duplicate of this one (the one in the link) Google will then ignore that page and only index the page in the canonical

**In Short**
Canonical is used for duplicate content if you only need one page to been indexed and want to avoid duplicate content issues.
if you have duplicate content its perfect for you.

Hope that helps clear it up

[jesse-landry]

Mr. Painter said it perfectly.

With that said, I think the decision of whether or not to use canonical tags depends partially on what the varying URLs are. If they are like the books/author example above the Canonical tags are for you.

However a lot of people mistakenly think that using canonical tags to solve the non-www to www duplication is a proper solution when in fact you need to 301 in that case.

So if your URL duplication issues stem from http://books.com/author and http://www.books.com/author then you need to put a redirect in place instead.

Just wanted to add that tidbit on just in case. Good luck!

[Dr-Pete]

Just want to add one comment. Where people end up in trouble is when they apply the canonical tag too broadly (to non-duplicates). This tends to happen when you have a CMS and one template drives multiple pages. So, let's say that all of your product pages are created by:

http://example.com/product.php

...and you just add IDs to that to create a product, like:

http://example.com/product.php?id=123

If you add a canonical tag to "product.php" pointing to a single product, you would essentially tell Google to canonicalize every product page on your site to just that one product. This is because that one physical file impacts hundreds of URLs. So, in that case, you would have to make sure the code logic was in place to apply the proper ID.