Canonical tags

[Boodreaux]

How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content 
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL.

By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice?  Not sure if that question makes sense.

Poo

[Jake-a-boo]

Just another one of Googles nice little perks proving that they might just like us SEO's

Cheers!

[RobertFisher]

Corey,

Got to give you props on the info and the post. I had not seen it before and now am glad I came to Q&A tonight. Excellent info.

Good CMS advice (if you gotta fix, don't recreate it). Super advice on the canonical.

Boodreaux, given your experience level, if you are not using a CMS like WP or Joomla, make sure your developer understands the custom coding and the various permutations.

Best to both.

[RobertFisher]

Jake

Nice hit with the Tag Manager. I did not know about it... Learn something everyday and that is what I love about this gig.

Best.

[Jake-a-boo]

Any Redirect will lose value. A 301 loses a portion of your juice and a 302 gives you nothing. What the canonical tag does is redirect the authority of the page with the tag to the target page you want to hold the authority (usually the parent page, be it Root Domain, primary landing page or a subcategory page)

Google has a new fantastic tool I think everyone should know about called Google Tag Manager. It creates a container under the that you can fill with any tag, Google or non-Google tags. It is fantastic because you don't need your programer to go in and change anything and no need to access code. It gives the power to you to add and remove tags and define the parameters of each one you put in place. in addition it builds the tag for you if you aren't a code wizard. this makes the world of SEO and OSO shake due to the rainbows and sunshine of not having t bother your programer with little fixes like tag adding and removal.

I hope this helped!

Cheers!

[CoreyNorthcutt]

1. It's not hard to implement.  It's just one line of code to each page.  If you're using software like WordPress or Joomla, there is probably an existing extension that will place it on all pages.  If it's a custom site, I wrote your developer some code and explained it here.
2. Redirecting old URL's was a good idea (ideally a 301 redirect done by at the web server level).
3. Not having canonical tags doesn't necessarily mean that you'll lose 'link juice' (if that's the phrase we're going with), but it can cause canonical issues (lost 'link juice', as well as negative issues that come from duplicate content in the index).  Often times, they're little things that you don't even think about (ie. a variable that's automatically ended on URL's by a certain service, like ?utm_source=twitter, an affiliate link, or just an issue of a missing "/" at the end of a web address).  With so many possible variables, my philosophy is just to use rel="canonical" everywhere so that you can not worry about it.

Cheers.