Do I need to add rel="canonical" to my website?

[Maxwell]

Hello,

Do I need to add rel="canonical" in head tag of my website ?

for example:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" />

I don't know benefit from adding this tag for my website, does anyone give me any definitions ?

Thanks in advanced!

 

[ElixantTechnology]

A quick google search pulls up a wikipedia page [URLnf="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element"]here[/URLnf]

 

[Maxwell]

Maxwell

It can be understandable but when I should put it on my site or not?

 

[ElixantTechnology]

Hm, valid question and unfortunately I can't answer that one directly, maybe someone else on here can be of assistance?

 

[brainmoore]

This tag is used to tell bots about an alternate page/URL which we want bots to index and assign their prominence instead of that page on which this tag is placed. It is more likely used to redirect bots to a new version of URL.

 

[DPrat]

rel="canonical" is an important part of on-page SEO - Pratwords.com

Hello,

Do I need to add rel="canonical" in head tag of my website ?

for example:


I don't know benefit from adding this tag for my website, does anyone give me any definitions ?

Thanks in advanced!

Hello Maxwell, rel="canonical" is a very important part of on-page SEO for the following reasons:

1. Every website have two versions of each page, one with "www" and one without it. This leads to trigger duplicate content issue and will lead to penalization by Google. To prevent it, the preferred domain (with "www" or without it) is mentioned. Whenever Google crawls and index a website, the preferred domain version is indexed.
   
2. When two or more of your webpages have similar contents like in case of news websites which have different versions of a similar news on different webpages . It is suggested to specify the preferred domain as the the latest news's website not the old ones.

I hope this helps.

 

[vaneetagoswami]

That's really good Dpart. Previously I thought that canonical is used when we used a bit part of content which is already published in the search engine and due to avoid the complain of DMCA.