The canonical link is used to tell the major search engines which URL you would prefer them to use when you have more than one URL pointing to the same page.
Here are some examples of the sorts of URL’s we are talking about.
- www.example.com/product.php?name=shoes&color=black&brand=clarks
- www.example.com/product.php?brand=clarks&color=black&name=shoes
If you simply add a <link> tag to specify your preferred version of the page’s URL inside the <head> section of your page then the search engines will treat all variations of the URLs to that page as pointing to the one you specify. So for our examples above you would add the following into the head of each page:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?name=shoes” />
If you are using a content management platform to manage your site (e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.) then these platforms can be configured to insert a canonical link into every page automatically.
If you are worried about that your site structure is negatively effecting your search engine rankings, then please use the contact us form and we’d be delighted to see what we can do to help.
For more details on how Google uses the canonical link go here.