In sometime mid February this year, the three big search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live) gang up to announce a coordinated effort and it is wise for us to take this matter seriously. It is about the canonical page and canonical link element.

Many people might not heard of this canonical page and canonical link element.  So I just briefly explain what is it:

Due to the use of dynamic URLs, one single web page can have more than 1 valid urls (address) pointing to it.  For example:

www.yoursite.com
yoursite.com
www.yoursite.com/
yoursite.com/
www.yoursite.com/index.html
yoursite.com/index.html
www.yoursite.com/Home.aspx
yoursite.com/Home.aspx

http://www.yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com

http://www.yoursite.com/index.html

http://yoursite.com/index.html

http://www.yoursite.com/Home.aspx

http://yoursite.com/Home.aspx

https://www.yoursite.com

Of which the official one (or your most preferred version) is www.yoursite.com. So the page at www.yoursite.com is call the canonical page. A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

However, if you don’t tell the search engines which one is your canonical page, they might not know which one it is, as such, they will just select one of the URL and flagged others as DUPLICATE CONTENTS!

That’s why now with the introduction of this canonical link element, you have to add the line of code in all your other non-canonical pages to identify your canonical page. Your problem can be solved by adding a <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Search Engines: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.”

From the above example, this is how you specify your canonical link element in one of the non-canonical page e.g. https://www.yoursite.com:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com”/>

Add this line of code to the <head> section of the non-canonical page.

If you are using CMS, you can just hardcode the canonical URL into the section (please make sure you test and confirm) so that any duplicate variants of that URL should still contain the correct canonical URL inside.

One more important point to take note is Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can specify a canonical page on www.yoursite.com from a set of pages on yoursite.com or help.yoursite.com, but not on yoursite-blog.com.

Take a look at this video from Matt Cutts on the details on Canonical Link Element:

For those of you who use WordPress, there is a plugin by Joost de Valk – Canonical URL’s that you can install, very useful.


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