• Subcribe to Our RSS Feed

What is Canonical Link Element

Feb 17, 2009 by     4 Comments    Posted under: SEO Tips

I just learn from Twitter that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft implemented and announces Last week  support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. And it is what they called. Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes

What is Canonical Link ?

It is a link that will tell Google to index the permalink of your post and not the duplicate content of your post such as follows :

https://www.techathand.net/gsma-2009-nokia-ovi-store/page3/

https://www.techathand.net/gsma-2009-nokia-ovi-store/page4/

GSMA 2009 : Nokia OVI Store

So with the above example it will tell Google to index https://www.techathand.net/gsma-2009-nokia-ovi-store/ and not the other URL mentioned above.

So What is the Solution ?

I am not really that fun of installing lots of plug-ins in my site so if I can make it in PHP it will be better. Since the link should be inserted in the head part of the post I made this php code inserted in my header. { It means put it before </head> part of the header code }

<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" />

I think it works since even if I test it my other blog post it still shows the permalink as the canonical link.

But if you don’t want to mess your Header Codes from WordPress you can install plug-ins. The Yoast Plug-in did not help me since it is clashing with my other plugin and I believe a simple code as shown above works.

Source : mattcutts.com , marhgil & noel bautista

4 Comments + Add Comment

  • Thank you for the code. Does it work to a free blogger account?

    Rein Valdezs last blog post..Ups and Down

  • […] @techathand What is Canonical Link Element https://www.techathand.net/?p=2464 […]

  • How Can the New Canonical Tag Eliminate your Duplicate Posts?…

    The 3 major search engines agree on a way to tackle duplicate posts within your site.   It has been a problem before when a certain web page can be accessible via different URLs.
    Example is
    http://www.example.com/products/
    In some websites, the same web pag…

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>