The New Canonical Meta Tag

For some time now many sites have been dogged with duplicate content issues, or when it occurs to your own site it is known as canonical issues. As you know this is when you may have several versions of the same content on your site, due to the way many database sites are created especially shopping carts. This can also occur with non www , index and no index types file names, where you ended up with several homepages depending on how you link with the site.

Google has struggled to deal with different versions of a page, normally choosing one page as a master and then discarding or not degrading the other versions. The problems arise when Google chooses the wrong version of the page to shown as the master, because it found that version first.

The way Google wants to deal with this issue is to introduce the canonical tag, which you input within the head area to tell Google which page is the main one you want to be included within its search engine index. For many this may seem unimportant, but in hard to get search terms, canonical issues can mean the difference between ranking and not, it is also surprising how few SEO companies are fully aware of the problems it could cause.

The employee we all like to here from, namely Matt cuts talks about the canonical tag within an interview an example being