How does one know where to insert the right strips of coding on the right pages for Canonical Links?

[FrontlineMobility]

On my Website, I am the only SEO optimizer wizard person. I have to teach myself everything and I get overwhelmed a lot. I recently started using SEOMOZ and on my report it stated we had duplicate page titles and that it was bad and should be fixed quickly. So I did my research and found that I needed to use canonical links to reference one page to be indexed. However my problem lies in exactly how to add this coding to my site. I greatly appreciate any help or at least looking at this question.

[CraigAddyman]

Hey Justin,

Basically the bots follow the links so it might follow example.com and example.com/index.html once it get to your actual page it then reads the canonical tag which indicates which version is the correct version to use.

Hope that helps

[ClickValueMedia]

Hi Justin,

Yes you have to use the code on all pages that are marked as duplicate. So for example if you have 5 pages shoeing as duplicate content you will have one as main page or the master or whatever you want to call it. You tehn place the code supplied by Aaran and Craig in the head section of the other 4 pages.

D

[FrontlineMobility]

Thanks for the coding, I still have a part left hanging at least maybe in my own mind it is. How does that strip of code reference the correct pages together? Does it just see there are duplicate pages and bundle them for the Search Engine? or do I have to place other codes in my site to target those pages?

[CraigAddyman]

Hey

Quite easy really just add the following snippet

rel="canonical" href="Your URL Here" />

This should be placed between the tags of the page.

BUT.......

Make sure you are using this correctly, if you have duplicate page titles due to canonicalisation (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development) then that's fine but if its just because you have duplicate page titles across your pages then they need to be rewritten.

Hope that helps

[aaran]

This is the format of the canonical tag

You have to add this within the tags. But to getting the current page URL involves dynamic scripting and it depends on which CMS you are using.