It's common for certain types of sites to have pages with similar content. A canonical page is the preferred page of the pages with highly similar content.
For example, you could have Beatles albums listed by popularity or by albums on two pages:
www.example.com/beatles.php?sort=pop
www.example.com/beatles.php?sort=album
To a search engine, these are two different pages. The major search engines will eventually learn that they contain similar content and prioritize one - but you can control this by adding a tag in the <head> section of both pages.
This basically allows you to tell Google - "Out of all the pages with this link, prioritize this link instead in search".
For more information, check out Google's explanation of Canonical Pages.
EDIT:
For those of you using Wordpress, Blogger, or most other popular blogging software, this is added automatically for you.![]()
For example, you could have Beatles albums listed by popularity or by albums on two pages:
www.example.com/beatles.php?sort=pop
www.example.com/beatles.php?sort=album
To a search engine, these are two different pages. The major search engines will eventually learn that they contain similar content and prioritize one - but you can control this by adding a tag in the <head> section of both pages.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/beatles.php?sort=pop" />This basically allows you to tell Google - "Out of all the pages with this link, prioritize this link instead in search".
For more information, check out Google's explanation of Canonical Pages.
EDIT:
For those of you using Wordpress, Blogger, or most other popular blogging software, this is added automatically for you.
