Rarely do the “Big Three” Search Engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN agree on anything. Recently they agreed on the use and benefits of the Canonical Tag.
GOiMarketing.com has certainly been on board from day one and we have see positive results from employing this clutter clearing tag on our Client’s websites.
Canonical, according to Wikipedia means:
“Basic, canonic, canonical: reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality, e.g., “a basic story line”; “a canonical syllable pattern.”
The reason for this tag is give the Searcher on Search Engines a better chance to find what they are looking for. The problem has been duplicate text on multiple pages or on the same page served by multiple URLS. On-line Retailers and – sites have this issue when multiple URLS feed into a particular product page.
When a search engine searches for say, a blue dress shirt, a clothier website could have a dozen URLS for that one page with the blue dress shirt. These could be special sales, partner site redirects, etc.
The problem is the Search Engines often only allow just so many pages of your site to be crawled per visit. If you have twelve pages of the same content, and they are all crawled, then other pages may not be crawled and your results will be incomplete on the search engines.
The Canonical Tag allows you to determine the Canonical URL for that item and to anoint it as such using the correct code. This allows you to help determine that most or all of your most important pages are crawled and that duplicate content isn’t re-crawled, thus wasting your chance for a more robust multi-keyword ranking on the search engines.
This Canonical Tag will also help sites that for some reason feel they must repeat the same main information on their site on multiple pages. Placing the Canonical Tag on the most correct and basic page will help that information to be posted in a high position.
GOiMarketing is committed to utilizing this Tag whenever we see a benefit for our Clients. You should make sure you are doing the same and not waste your opportunities on-line.
Richard Uzelac, CEO, GOiMarketing.
