What is the Canonical Link Tag?
A few months ago Google introduced the Canonical Link Tag.
This tag is supposed to solve the duplicate content issue on different URL, which can negatively affect those page’s ranking. It just tells search engine the preferred version of the content, in order to be ranked better by the engines themselves.
The Canonical Link Tag should reside in the HEAD section of the page, and the href attribute should point to the URL of the chosen page. That should be enough.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourURL.com/">
Canonical Link Tag vs. Redirect
Upsides
It is way better than a 301 redireccion: it’s search engine to be redirected, not the users hence not affecting the user experience though making sure rankings wouldn’t be affected.
A 301 redireccion would actually affects search engine who have to update their rankings according to the quality of the content of those pages
Downsides
However, while the 301 redirects visitors and search engines from different domains, the Canonical link tag can be used only into a single domai, its folders and subdomains. That’s the only downside. Still it’s a pretty tool.
Possible application of the Canonical Link Tag
Usually PHP pages create dynamic content with random urls, lacking of informative content related in any way to the content. They usually have the visitor’s session ID and merge content from different sources. The Canonical Link Tag can preserve rankings of the original page which featured the content.
To learn more about the Canonical Link Tag, check out this post from Matt Cutts or take a look into the Google Webmaster Center.
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