SEO Nicnacs - Canonicalization

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Find canonical links on webpages.Having the same content on several pages create what SEO:s call duplicate content. To put it briefly duplicate content may confuse search engine robots of the contents true origin and whom to credit for it. The problem is especially prevalent in CMS:s such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, but also for ecommerce platforms like Magento.
A few years ago a new metatag commonly referred to as rel=canonical was introduced to remedy the problem, and this is what it would look like in the source code:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoursite.com" />

Here is a short example portraying the problem:

You have a website page with the following URLs:

a) http://www.seoblogg.se

The content of this page is also available on the following page:

b) http://seoblogg.se


If this is the case, if the same content is found on both urls, and if there is no canonical link present, search engines will be confused about content origin. At first glance you may say - "this is the same site", but fact is search engine spiders consider the two to be different sites.


The problem may arise in different shapes and forms, and also when dealing with a multi lingual site:

a) http://seoblogg.se

The content on the above site is written in English, but mirrored in Swedish on the site below:

b) http://sökmotoroptimering.se

Even if these may be considered two different sites, they are - in the eyes of Google and Bing, the same even if the content is written in different languages.

This plugin facilitates checking:

- Whether the page has any canonical link at all.
- If the page is the canonical page, and if not - what canonical page it points to.

In your address bar, you will see these icons:

- A green icon. This is the canonical page, i.e the link points to this URL, and the URL in question is the one to be credited.
- A grey icon. This page has no canonical link.
- A red icon. This page has a canonical link which points to another URL, that is - another page is to take credit for the content.


For those who want to learn more about canonical URL:s, see this Google page:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en