Is this all that is needed for a 'canonical' tag?

[infinart]

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?

[infinart]

Thanks Jeff, it definitely is. I guess having the "rel=" at the end and not the start doesn't really matter.

[customerparadigm.com]

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

[infinart]

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?

[customerparadigm.com]

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