What is Canonical URL..?

[ShreyaKoushik]

What is Canonical URL..?

[fayeseom]

In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see. Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage. The typical example used is that most people treat the following URLs as the same: www.example.com. example.com

[mktcosmoedge]

A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page as part of search engine optimization.

[albert_Cage]

Hello,

the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.

Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage. The typical example used is that most people treat the following URLs as the same:

www.example.com
example.com
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

The fact is that these are all different URLs. From a search engine perspective, this can cause a bit of an issue. Hence the idea of canonicalization. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL (to present to the search engines) when there are multiple choices available. Typically a search engine, such as Google will attempt to pick the best URL that they feel is the authority for that page. However, sometimes they may in fact select the wrong one. Now let’s suggest that you have product pages that depending on how the user navigated to the pager returns a different URL… same page but different URL, now we have a duplicate content issue. Not to mention the nightmare for interlinking and external link inventories.

The easiest way to avoid this is to let the Search engines and the users know which is your "preferred URL" a.k.a canonical URL. One suggestion is to redirect all of the variations to your canonical URL (the URL that you want to be the authority). In February, the major search engines announced another solution with the canonical tag. This tag gives you control of the content that you want the engines (and users) to see.

[MakeMoneyOnline]

canonical URL allows you to tell search engines that certain similar URLs are actually one and the same. Sometimes you have products or content that is accessible under multiple URLs, or even on multiple websites. Using a canonical URL (an HTML link tag with attribute rel=canonical) these can exist without harming your rankings.

[david hong]

Canonical URL: the URL that the webmasters want search engines considered as the official address of one webpage. In other words, a canonical URL is what webmasters want visitors to see. Canonical URL used to prevent duplicate content sites