Is this all that is needed for a 'canonical' tag?
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Hello,
I have a Joomla site. I have put in a plugin to make the page source show: eg.
<link href="[http://www.ditalia.com.au/designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace](view-source:http://www.ditalia.com.au/designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace)" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" />Is this all that is need to tell the search engines to ignore the any other links or indexed pages with a url which is created automatically by the system before the SEF urls are initiated?
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Thanks Jeff, it definitely is. I guess having the "rel=" at the end and not the start doesn't really matter.
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Carl -
I just went to the page (see screenshot), and did a view source.
It does look like the rel canonical tag is there:
screenshot-designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace.jpg rel-canonical-view-source.gif
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Thanks Jeff. It's sort of helps... now I am uncertain if the plugin is working properly though.
Can anyone clear this up for me?
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Carl -
Yes, in order to avoid duplicate content, you can use the Rel=canonical tag.
Usually the tag comes first, and then the href after it like this:
<link rel="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">canonical" href="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.ditalia.com.au/designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace</a>" /></link rel="<a>
It should work the way you did it too, although some systems might throw an error if the positions are reversed. I saw this previously with an SEO tool and the img src ALT tag was in a non-usual spot.
Here are more resources on the canonical tag, here on SEO Moz:
Confused about Rel Canonical? http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Moz How To Guide, http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Finally, if you want to delve in to an article by Google's Matt Cutts, here's a link where he discusses it in detail:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff
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