mardi 6 décembre 2011

An Introduction To The rel="canonical" Tag


The rel="canonical" tag has has been around for a while, but there are still an abundance of people who may not have realised it exists or know precisely the reason for it's introduction, but many search engine optimisers (SEO's) will be the first to help explain the advantages it brings.
The rel=canonical tag can be found within the <head> section of a website and can serve several uses. Such as being used to help solve duplication issues and also to refer to a page on another domain that is the original source of the content.
Why Choose The rel="canonical" Tag?
As suggested, a canonical page is the preferred set of pages that may share similar content with other pages. For example, eCommerce websites may have similar content within the product pages across several other parts of their site. In this scenario the webmaster can help identify to the search engines the page that will be considered as the preferred page. The page that has the rel=Canonical tag situated within the header of a web page will instruct the search engines what page is the original source. Without the canonicalisation and there are several identical pages, these can be treated as duplicates and eventually will drop out of the search engine result pages (SERPs). Hence the importance for the right page not to be treated as a duplicate content and given a canonical tag.
The webmaster will add the rel="canonical" link to the <head> section of a non-canonical version of each HTML page. Whenever using this tag, it must be clear that it is used for pages that are identical only.
An example of the code will appear like the following:
<head>
<link rel="canonical" rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link/5459229']);" href="http://www.website.com/" />
</head>
It must also be noted that the rel="canonical" tag has other uses within the SEO industry, including webmasters. For example there may be many situations where 301 redirects are not possible, or just difficult to implement. Therefore, the handy canonical tag comes in handy with it's increased simplicity. As the canonical URL tag can be used in place of a 301 redirect.
But, there are a few reasons why it's not a simple replacement but a great alternative. Such as a 301 will allow all traffic to be redirecting to the most relevant web page, whereas, a canonical URL will only pass information onto the search engines and crawlers. It must also be noted that 301's can re-direct traffic to another website, something that a canonical tag cannot because it can only be used for a single domain.
For many SEO's and webmasters, there are still many questions unsolved, in the effort to establish the full benefits of the canonical tag when in use. Something that is apparent within the entire search engine marketing industry with other areas such as pay per click (PPC), conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and search engine optimisation (SEO) all changing on a daily basis with experts always fighting to stay ahead of the competition and evolving as the industry grows.

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