How to Implement “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content
Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 12th, 2009
The Big 3 search engines have agreed on a meta tag standard for identifying a page’s “permalink” or “Canonical URL”. One problem a lot of sites experience is having the same content show up with different URLs due to search features, categories, etc. This can hurt your pages and your site, and so having this solution can really help out with the problem.
So now that the big 3 are all going to “honor” this new tag, how do we implement the “Canonical Tag”?
Step 1: Identify what the permalink URL is for the page. You need to figure out the one URL that you want used when search engines (and people too) look for and list that page.
Step 2: Now you need to figure out how you are going to dynamically call that URL from each page including when the page is pulled up from different search parameters or what not.
Step 3: Once you know how to get the URL, place the following tag inside the <HEAD> tag with the canonical URL:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/mydir/mypage.html">
If you have any questions about this, please leave a comment!
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