How Google Uses Cannonization to Handle Your Site

Canonical tags are one of the newest things to get right when you have a page that you wish to rank well on Google. It was issued by Google on their Webmaster page regarding this which is important for all web masters to note. Here are some details on the specifics of how Google uses Canonization to handle your site.

First of all the question that you may have is "what are Canonical Tags"? Quite simply, they are tags that you can place on your website as the Webmaster, so that Google will know which URL to direct your guests to for the correct page. It helps with duplicate pages and content.

An example of this is as follows: say you have similar content on two or more of your pages of your site. Canonization of your site is how Google looks at this. They sort it and send traffic to the page that fits best. The end result of this to that you as the Webmaster end up with several dead links. Repeat after me: "this is not a good thing". How would you expect Google to know which URL matches which page? That is the exact problem. Many Web masters have this happen and wonder why they end up with a "404 error message". So how can you fix this then?

Google announced on February 12, 2009, that they have a solution for this for your site, which will not only make your Dev. department have less work to handle; but it will also help prevent hijacking of your website. If you are not presently using this method then Google would suggest that you begin. Here is a link to that code: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

It is that simple. Place the URL that you wish to be the URL inside of the quotation marks and upload that to your server inside of the "head" portion of your site. That is how Google uses Canonization to handle your site. But how do you prevent Hijackers from taking control of your URL?

This is how . Take for example the new movie "The Twilight Saga - New Moon". It has many links that direct people to information on the movie. So the company that has the main site creates a URL to direct customers to itself on the main site so people looking for "The Twilight Saga - New Moon" find their site. Ah, but "Johny or Susie the hackers" want to hijack the traffic to the main site. So what do they do? They use various methods which allow them to accomplish this goal. Google prevents this for the real owners of "The Twilight Saga - New Moon" by allowing them to insert a Canonical tag into their main site. No more hijacking. It does this through the code thus making it more difficult for the hackers to gain access via a re-direct.