Canonical urls thesis

Found in the section of a web page's HTML source code, a canonical tag looks like this: These can either be self-referencing (where a canonical tag point to a page's own URL) or can reference another page's URL to consolidate signals.

Often referred to as rel="canonical," canonical tags are a way of telling the search engines that a specified URL is the master copy of a page. They allow you to specify the canonical URL for a page. A canonical link allows webmasters to prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page.

Use canonicals to specify the URL that you want the search engines to rank. When you have duplicate or near-identical pages on your site, there is a chance that the individual URLs could earn links from external sources. Use canonical URLs to consolidate the link signals from multiple pages into a single URL that you specify.

The 'Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products' should be set to yes. In many cases, you will find that this is already set to yes, which means you don't need to do anything else on this. Head back to the Search Engine Optimizations section on the Catalog page and find the 'Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories' option.