what is canonical urls and how to use it?

[martinkane285]

I am little confuse with canonical urls? can you please tel me what is the role of canonical urls in seo?

[Pet09]

Check out the below urls.

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

Though the website is same but there exists different urls for the same page. Canonical urls are the duplicateurls that exist in a website. And Canonicalization is the solution for it. We can use the canonical URL tag attribute, that is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective.

For example: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" /> tells the search engines that though we have different urls there but link & content metrics should flow to www.example.com only.

We can also use .htaccess for the same but it is a complicated process.

[Kevin Peter]

You have two URLs that point to the same page?
For example,
http://mydomain.com/shirt.html and http://mydomain.com/apparel/shirt.html

might go to the exact same product page.

Since two URLs are being used and the page content is the same for both of them, Google thinks you have two pages with duplicate content.

Canonical URLs are used to prevent this.

When Google crawls the page, it will see the Canonical URL and this is what Google recognizes as the "official" URL of the page. It will use this URL to index the site instead of the one used to access the page.

[wdcbangalore]

In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see. Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage.

[michaeljones]

It is a method of specifying our exact url to the search engine. The url of a website can exist in different formats like www.example.com, example.com, www.example.com/index.php like that. We set one among them as a canonical url. This helps the search engine to understand that all these urls are same and there is no cotent duplication

[efusionworld]

Canonical URL is use to tell search engines the original source of the article. This is also to solve duplicate content issues on site.

Check out the below urls.
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

For example: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" /> tells the search engines that though we have different urls there but link & content metrics should flow to www.example.com only.

[williamsbarbara]

I"am trying to use toolbelt seo link feature to set up head tags for canonical urls.

[dipika]

canonical tag specifies the source URL of given page to a search engine such as Google. It is used to declare a single page as its own source or duplicate page to reference their source page.