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What Is mean by Canonical link?
I am a bit confused about canonical link. I have visited many websites but I didn't find proper answer. I find only one answer in every websites that it is used to avoid duplicate and nothing else. I would like to know in Google point of view. How Google treats the canonical link. How search engine bots treat this?
2 Answers
- ?Lv 77 years agoFavorite Answer
A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical", or "preferred", version of a web page as part of search engine optimization. It is described in RFC 6596, which went live in April 2012.
Duplicate content issues occur when the same content is accessible from multiple URLs. For example, http://www.example.com/page.html would be considered by search engines to be an entirely different page from http://www.example.com/page.html?parameter=1, even though both URLs return the same content. Another example is essentially the same (tabular) content, but sorted differently.
In February 2009, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (for their Bing search engine) announced support for the canonical link element, which can be inserted into the <head> section of a web page, to allow webmasters to prevent these issues. The canonical link element helps webmasters make clear to the search engines which page should be credited as the original.
According to Google, the canonical link element is not considered to be a directive, but a hint that the web crawler will "honor strongly".
While the canonical link element has its benefits, Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google's webspam team, has claimed that the search engine prefers the use of 301 redirects. Cutts claims the preference for redirects is because Google's spiders can choose to ignore a canonical link element if they feel it is more beneficial to do so.
Source(s): Wikipedia - Anonymous7 years ago
Canonical links can avoid duplicate content penalties to your site . Better option than using Canonical links is to 301 redirect duplicate post/pages to the original one .
