Canonical Tag Is Not To Be Abused

This new tag is not something every one has to implement on his website. Most won’t need at.

This is much like 301 permanent redirect, so say you have two identical pages, you know that search engines will index only one of them. Now you have the choice to tell search engines which ONE you want indexed, which one should not get indexed.

This tag will help you do just that and more.

However note that it’s not just a TAG, because there are ways they’ve created to handle abuse.

So for instance, if you have the known “useless” pages like Terms and conditions, Privacy Policy, etc… you cannot tell search engines to NOT index those but index your homepage for example, something completely different. So the pages have to be similar or identical for you to use this tag, so it must be used where NEEDED.

The other thing is that if you have two pages identical and you want page A to get indexed because it has a lot of backlinks pointing towards it – then you can use of course the tag on the other page (or more than one if you have multiple similar or identical pages AND just like a 301 redirect, pagerank, backlinks value etc pass to the page you want including the fact that it will get indexed – NOT the other one. The other one won’t, it will be ignored.

So very useful if you have like ecommerce site with lots of very similar or identical pages – it used to be that search engines would decide which page they will index, which won’t themselves which could create problems. Now you have control over situation.

But I only recommend using or thinking about this tag if you REALLY have some kind of problem with duplicate content issues. Like real visible problems.

Otherwise JUST make your website pages unique with original content so you index ALL pages.

Canonical Tag Is Not To Be Abused

Tags: Canonical Tag, OnPage Optimization

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 11:51 AM and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response and/or trackback from your own site.