Canonicalization

So how big do you think your site is? 100 products and some general pages, say 150 pages? Think again. Are both www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com useable and displaying the same content? And both index.php and '/'? And shoes.php, shoes.php?sort=price, and shoes.php?sort=date? Or even
www.youroldsite.com and www.yournewsite.com? And do you care about SEO and your search engine ranking? You might want to continue reading...

Duplicate content
To Google (or any other search engine) the above pages are in principle all different. It does however, often recognize this fact and display only one in the search results. Still, you could do better.

PageRank diffusion
If sites A and B link to yours, that's great. You got some backlinks. Depending on their PageRank, you will get some PageRank juice as well! Twice! Nice! But wait, closer inspection reveals page A links to www.yoursite.com/index.php, site B to yoursite.com/index.php. To make matters worse, you find a third site that links to yoursite.com/ (no index.php). Every individual page in that list will start with zero PageRank and gets a little but only from either page A, B OR C! So, you might have three backlinks, but the PageRank is divided over the three 'different' pages. If only there was a way of Google to stop this madness! Luckily, there is...

Link rel=canonical
With the canonical tag, a page can say to Google 'I am insignificant, please ignore me and see me as duplicate of ... (page in the href part of the tag)'. You can even do this for pages that are not 100% identical (but still are very similar). And it even works cross-domain. Remember you are always 'giving away' your PageRank (but if it is to a page of your own, that can be very beneficial), so the tag should be in the 'inferior' pages. Google will also take the 'canonical' (or 'master') page as the one actually shown in the index. Remember this is just a guideline for Google...it can always decide to ignore your effords, if big'ol search bot feels like it ;-D

Here's the tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.someplace.com/heresthemotherofallsimilarpages"/>

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