Importance of Canonical Tag In Search Engine Optimization
June 16, 2010 – 9:36 pm
An ecommerce website might allow various sort orders for a page (like by Lowest Price, Most Popular, Sort by Brand etc.) or webmaster might want tracking codes added to URLs for Analytics. You could end up with multiple pages with similar content. There may be 1000s of pages with almost same content. This can lead to content duplication issues and incoming links may get divided among these similar pages. To solve this problem, search engines now support Canonical tag which specifies a canonical or original version of page which you want to promote among all the pages with similar content. For e.g.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=blue-widget”/>