Hello Friends,
What is Canonical Link, what is the uses of it and how it useful in seo ?

Thanks

Dear friend

Canonical is a issue which is harmful for SEO, so if our website has this firstly we hae to remove this.....

Canonical is a issue It is not useful for SEO. Use canonical tag for that.

It can help site owners with duplicate content issues. Google and other search engines like Yahoo and Microsoft Live announced their support for canonical link element.

Reference:
http://randymarasigan.com/what-is-ca...ink-element-71

I think that for various SE they cold be 2 different kind of links at all.

Well at least one answer was correct!

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...sentation.html

Each page on your site should have one and only one URL that can be used to reference it called the canonical (or "preferred") URL. All other non-canonical URLs for a page should be 301 redirected to the canonical form.

The lack of URL canonicalization leads to duplicate content and more importantly, split PageRank/link juice which causes your URL to not rank as well as it could.

A couple of years ago, the big 3 (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft) announce support for a new version of the <link> element commonly referred to as the "canonical link element" to help sites that cannot implement 301 redirects deal with canonicalization issues. It's general form is:

<link rel="canonical" href="insert canonical URL here">

However, Cutts and others have said this should be used as a last resort only if you cannot implement 301 redirects to solve the problems. To my knowledge though all 3 engines "said" they would support it, Google is the only one who has actually implemented support.

Regardless, 301 redirects are supported by all search engines to solve canonicalization problems. It's been the recommend fix for it for a decade. There will be lots of search engines that do not support the canonical link element. So 301 redirects are still the preferred solution.

mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

Follow the above link to learn about canonical link element.

Originally Posted by jacks smith

Hello Friends,
What is Canonical Link, what is the uses of it and how it useful in seo ?

Thanks

Canonical tag is very important from the point of SEO, canonical tag is used to avoid duplicate content when Google spider crawl the web page by reading the canonical it came to know that this is duplicate content and the original content at this place. When we have a shopping website and products are coming dynamically then it is necessary that you need to use canonical tag otherwise your website can be pnealized by Google due to duplicate content.

hi,
can i know what is meant by canonical url and how does it works?
will the canonical url be useful for a site having multiple url?

What is a canonical URL? I was reading something about that in some forums, so don’t worry if you don’t know, I also didn’t. Around Google, canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Canonical essentially means “standard” or “authoritative”, so a canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL that you want the visitors to see. Depending of how your web site was programmed or how your tracking URLs were setup.

If you talking about the rel="canonical" tag then it's a method for telling google that you got duplicate content but the the URL specified as the canonical url is the page that should get the serps.

You can read more about it on the official google webmaster central blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html

Put simply, it's the difference between this:

http://www.mysite.com

and this:

http://mysite.com

Basically you want to set your server up so they both point to the same content, otherwise, you'll be seen to be having duplicate content.

The problem often arises when you have database driven websites. In which case a given product in your database, for example, may have several URLs which are generated to display the item, depending on how it's located in the db.

The process is also called URL Normalisation (Though Google prefers to say canonicalisation)

Read up on it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization

Canonical URL is the URL is the friendly search that you want the search engines to be treated as authentic. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.

A canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see. Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage. Here is a blog post from Google Webmaster Central on how to specify your canonical URL:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html

canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Canonical essentially means “standard” or “authoritative”, so a canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL that you want the visitors to see. Depending of how your web site was programmed or how your tracking URLs were setup for marketing campaign, there may be more than one URL for a particular web page.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

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

Quiet often Canonical URLs were used to describe the home page. Canonical URL is the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In simple words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.

Now I know, it almost the same as the homspage. Edgray explain it well.

Canonical URL is 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.

Canonical simply means or membership. It also means reduced to the simplest and meaningful. Remember, the original address is the simplest and most important of the URL you want to see.