Canonical Tags
Protecting your site from duplicate content issues
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Protecting your site from duplicate content issues
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GETTING STARTED
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Canonical Tags and Duplicate ContentThe canonical tag tells Google and other search engines which version of a page is the original or official piece of content, and which one should be shown in search results. If you have two versions of the same thing that means they will be splitting up important ranking metrics. The canonical tag helps you solidify these metrics and make sure they all go to the correct piece of content.
Most of the time you don't need have to use this tag, but if you're worried about duplicate content at all it's a simple tag to implement. If you are creating multiple duplicate pages it's good to have canonical tags. Google does not want to rank the same thing in search so it will only rank one version of a page. This is your way to show which page you want to show. Scrapers and SyndicationCanonical tags are also helpful as protection against scrapers and making sure your content gets credit for syndication. If your site content is copied and published somewhere else (this can happen maliciously) your canonical tag will help ensure that you still get credit for the original source in the eyes of search engines (unless the scraper strips the html tag or alters it). Not 100% coverage but certainly a good first line of defense to maintain your content as the the original source. Also, if you do syndicate content, and a partner copies your piece and posts it on his or her site, you will need the canonical tag to point back to your site.
Using Canonical Tags in WeeblyThe canonical tag is a basic set of html that you can to any page. It's important to always self reference, basically you have to put the canonical tag on your source page and have it link to itself and also put the tag on the duplicate page and have it link back to the source.
Important Note: Do not add the canonical tag to a Blog page because it will place that one URL on all blog posts which would basically tell Google that every blog post your write is the same as your blog homepage. |