Use of canonical link

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Graham

New Member
Hi all,

This maybe more of an SEO question but would it be recommended to use canonical link on the index page of a site.

For example <link rel="canonical" href="www.mysite.ie/ "/>

The site has some slight duplicate content as it is brochure style site, I've added the link to the other pages as in <link rel="canonical" href="www.mysite.ie/page1.html "/> I'm just not sure about adding it to the index page.


Thanks in advance,

Grhahm
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
What are you trying to achieve with it?
 
G

Graham

New Member
Hiya blacknight,

As my home page has some similar content and keywords as some of the other pages I'm trying to see if I can help it be indexed correctly by Google. Bing, Yahoo and Ask etc are picking up the pages separately however Google is a different matter so I'm thinking this would be helpful.

Thanks,


Graham
 
E

Eirhost

New Member
I'd add the canonical tag as it lets Google know which page you would like listed if there are several pages that have similar content.

However, Google generally prefers to list the home page rather than an inner page but adding the tag cant do any harm.

You can find out more about the Canonical tag here:

About rel="canonical" - Webmaster Tools Help
 
L

link8r

New Member
Basically, if you have a brochure style site, you shouldn't have too much duplicate content!

The canon is used, for example if you have multiple URL's for the same content and especially applies to dynamic sites, for example:

/products/car?=bmw&type?=650i

could also be presented on

/products/type?=650i&car?=bmw

The problem isn't as much "duplicate" content as much as its this: If you have 900 produces and 10 different parameters, you could end up with 90,000+ different unique URL's - and that's a problem for Google.

Index Page Canons are so common and so old that they are automatically dealt with

so

mysite.com/index.asp

and

mysite.com/index

and

mysite.com

and

mysite.com (301 ---> ....)

are all managed automatically
 
C

chicagorox

New Member
Speaking of canonical tags, should you tag your "m." mobile version of your site as canonical? I am thinking about developing a mobile site and I am afraid of impacting my seo rankings in a negative way.
 
G

Graham

New Member
link8r said:
Basically, if you have a brochure style site, you shouldn't have too much duplicate content!

The canon is used, for example if you have multiple URL's for the same content and especially applies to dynamic sites, for example:

/products/car?=bmw&type?=650i

could also be presented on

/products/type?=650i&car?=bmw

The problem isn't as much "duplicate" content as much as its this: If you have 900 produces and 10 different parameters, you could end up with 90,000+ different unique URL's - and that's a problem for Google.

Index Page Canons are so common and so old that they are automatically dealt with

so

mysite.com/index.asp

and

mysite.com/index

and

mysite.com

and

mysite.com (301 ---> ....)

are all managed automatically
Click to expand...

Hi Link8r,

Thank you for your reply.

The issue is not that each page has certain sections of each page that has the same content as each page, for example each page contains a price list that is the same across the board.
The reason for this is that as each page is designed to target a specific area when a search is executed, however I feel that this might mean that Google might be beginning to treat this as duplicate content with the latest updates to its APIs, where previously it did not.


Graham.
 
Krunal

Krunal

New Member
johnphilip2880 said:
The main use of canonical link is to prevent the duplicate content appearing on different URLs.
Click to expand...


A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs.
 
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