Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

**Dazza30** · 13-02-09

An excerpt from an article i read today

The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.

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SEOmoz | Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

Hopefully someone will find it usefull, ill need to read it again to fully understand how i could use the information.

**hpops** · 13-02-09

Thats bloody brilliant that

**Dazza30** · 13-02-09

So am i correct in thinking if i put rel="canonical" href="http://www.someurl.co.uk

in the head tag of my index page, this will tell Google etc to treat www.someurl.co.uk/index.html as the above?

**mtuffin** · 13-02-09

Plugins available for Wordpress, Drupal and Magento already!

Canonical URL links - Yoast - Tweaking Websites

Mike

**Seamaster** · 13-02-09

Whats a sitemap? ;-)

I don't really get it. So all the seo points of your home page is applied to your other pages?

So you have your home page which is really well optimised: has the right keywords, no affiliate links, nice content etc.

Then you have you other pages that are just links to products.

You use this tag and Google applies the SEO quality of the home page to the other pages?

**Barry** · 13-02-09

Originally Posted by Dazza30

So am i correct in thinking if i put rel="canonical" href="http://www.someurl.co.uk

in the head tag of my index page, this will tell Google etc to treat www.someurl.co.uk/index.html as the above?

Yes that's an example of how it would work.

Ta

Baz

**Dazza30** · 13-02-09

Originally Posted by Seamaster

Whats a sitemap? ;-)

I don't really get it. So all the seo points of your home page is applied to your other pages?

Theres two kinds, one is a page on your site which contains links to all the pages on your site.

The other is an xml sitemap if you have a Google webmaster tools account i think there's a tool on there that will generate one for you. Basicly an xml sitemap tells the search engine about all your pages.