Canonical Tags and SEO

Canonical tags and SEO go hand in hand. The good news is, it’s easy to add canonical tags to your website pages to help prevent duplicate content issues on your website.

As we discussed in the last post, these three different ways of linking to the same page would actually be considered three different pages by the major search engines:

http://bigfin.com/search-engine-optimization/
http://bigfin.com/search-engine-optimization
http://bigfin.com/search-engine-optimization/index.php

Adding Canonical Tags

Canonical tags help the search engines know which way you prefer the page to be indexed in those search engines and also let them know that this page is really just one page–not three.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://bigfin.com/search-engine-optimization/” />

The canonical tag for each page should be added somewhere between the head tags on your website page and the link in the tag should be to your preferred version of the page.

Be Consistent with Internal Linking

Whenever you are linking to your website page from another page, be sure to link to it in the same way that you have referenced it in the canonical tag. But the great news is that the canonical tag will help prevent duplicate content problems even if there are minor inconsistencies.

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