Loading ...Back in February, we first told you about the canonical tag the search engines were providing. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing, and later Ask, all joined together in an effort to reduce duplicate content. The canonical tag allows users to essentially dictate which page they want the search engines to index.
Is the canonical tag a better option than a 301 redirect? As Greg Grothaus of Google explains, the 301 redirect was the previous recommendation for duplicate page situations. However, that doesn’t mean that it is always the best option. The 301 redirect is primarily on the server side and transfers all the traffic from one page to another page permanently.
Take for example, a page that has a printer page option. Search engines may not be able to distinguish between the two pages and index each of them in their results. If a 301 redirect were used to solve the issue, any time a user clicked on the printer page he would automatically be sent back to the original page. In this situation, the canonical tag would solve the problem for the engines without affecting the users.
Both the canonical tag and the 301 redirect are useful, when given the appropriate situation.
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Another good example is e-commerce, where sometimes shops will have URL structures containing the category and product name:
http://www.website.com/category/product
If a product exists in 2 categories, you could specify the primary category and make this URL into the canonical URL. If the name of the product would change, you could use a 301 redirect to point to the new URL.
***I GIVE THIS VIDEO and ARTICLE 5 STARS!***
Understanding how the REL=CANONICAL tag works
is exceptional knowledge that every website owner
should know. Thank you so much for posting this.
Very good information! =)
Sincerely yours,
Tonya
“I am a Certified eBay Stores
and Website Designer specializing
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I have an Electronics, Computer e-commerce site and I just switch to a different e-commerce platform, and I plan to implement the canonical URL in order to move my back-links from one site to another, on my new site version for http://www.onestore.ro. This article confirmed me that I could not loose my actually back-links.
Thanks
Andrei
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Anything that works to “reduce duplicate content” is a good thing, as long as it does not cut out new and original news based on older text. It’s no winder that they “all joined together”, duplicate content is time and space waster for everyone.
oтличный блoг! Вы сами пишете?
Где-то я уже замечал такую информацию, но все равно спасибо
Где-то я уже читал схожую инфу, но все равно спасибо
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Hey Andrei,
I’ve recently had great success with canonical URL’s. Check out my site here http://www.zackelectronics.com.
What e-Commerce platform are you using?