So if you’ve been in the field of SEO for a few years, this problem may seem familiar to you. How many of you have websites out there that show www.home.com, home.com, and home.com/index all going to your homepage with that exact URL in the address bar? If this is your site, you may want to take note as each of those URLs shows a separate version of your homepage. To search engines this can be a problem as each different one poses an issue of duplicate content to the search engines. What about session ID’s at the end of a URL, ugh. Luckily, there is a canonical tag to show the search engines what the real page should be. The code to the tag should be placed in between the and the tags of your site. Here is the code:
<head>
…
<link rel=”canonical” href=”your URL”/>
…
</head>
It is very important to remember the “/” in the code at the end. Now with this, you can perform a canonical test to make sure your pages resolve and wah-lah, your issue of duplicate content should be solved. If anyone else has ever toyed with the tag yet, let us hear about it.
