Understanding Canonicalization

What is it about?

It is about how to tell search engines about duplicate content with in your site, where you can not eliminate that duplication of content.

Content Duplication with in my site? How?

Yes. Check your site in the following ways

www.yoursite.com
www.yoursite.com/
yoursite.com
yoursite.com/
yoursite.com/index.html
www.yoursite.com/index.html
yoursite.com/index.htm
.
.
.

Search engines (specially Google) will treats each URL as different and treats that content is duplicated.

Where is the content that i can not eliminate duplication?

In shopping cart websites..

cases you can not eliminate duplicate content

• Sort by price
• Sort by color
• Sort by size
  .
  .
  etc...

every time you sorts which will leads you to a new URL but some content.

What should i Do now?

Very simple ...

add the following tag to the duplicated content pages.

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yoursite.com.com/actual_content_page" >


It should be somewhere between < head > < /head > tags.