Canonical Tags- Get the credit you deserve!

Does copied content within your own site hamper your site’s ranking? How do you authorize others to use your content and still make sure that you get the search engine credits for the same? These are some of the questions which our SEO experts often face and we have tried to answer these questions here.

Google introduced the concept of the Canonical Tag way back in 2009. It intended to eliminate problems arising due to self-created duplicate content. Web site owners would be able to, by utilizing canonical url tags, give hints to search spiders on which pages to consider original and index higher.

How does it work for you?

The canonical tag is a link that is placed in the HTML header of a web page.

For eg:



This link is to be placed on the copied page. On encountering this link on a web page, search spiders would treat this page as a copy of the original namely http://www.myseopandit.com All the link metrics now flow to the original page. By using this tag, you can ensure that the right content is treated as original and gets the necessary credits for the same.

How is it different from 301 redirects?

Even 301 perform a similar function except that it redirects the visitor to the original page. Canonical tags, however, keeps the visitor on the same page while transferring the link metrics to the original page. In short, 301 redirects both visitor and search engine spider while canonical tag only redirects the spider.

Also from a technical perspective, 301 needs the expertise of a developer while canonical tags only need a basic understanding of HTML.

A word of caution:

• DO NOT USE CANONICAL TAGS TO TRANSFER THE LINK CREDITS FROM YOUR INTERNAL PAGES TO YOUR HOMEPAGE. It is not at all a very SEO friendly decision. Your Home Page ideally should not be the only important page on your site

• While placing the canonical link in your code, ensure correct formatting and double check the url of the original web page. A wrong url may do a lot of damage.

And now coming back to where we started, you can add canonical links to the copied pages on your site and advice search spiders not to crawl those pages but transfer all link credits and link juices to the original page. You can allow others to publish your content provided they are ready to add canonical links on their site page transferring all link credits to your page.

For more questions on canonical tags, you can post your query as a comment and we would be happy to explore the topic further together!