Comments on: Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes

By: Angel Raiter

Angel Raiter — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:12:40 +0000

Hello Matt, I have a question, perhaps you can help me..
I am responsible for marketing at an online gaming website in Brazil, our website has the largest gaming community in South America, I have done some SEO on it and we have no penalties on google, yet, for our main keywords “jogos online” we appear on the 9th page of results in google, our pagerank is 4 and I’m working in tweeter, facebook and Orkut for now, and will start a blog soon, in the attempt of making that number grow. Also, our website is on UOL, which is the largest web portal in Brazil (Pagerank 7) and our site has its own URL there megajogos.uol.com.br and also its own pagerank of 5.
At first I thought, hey, put the rel=canonical in the UOL site pointing to ours, but its not in the same domain, a 301 I can’t use cause the site, although it is ours, runs through a script and shows up as part of their website (our site + a navigation bar at the very top with the UOL brandname) when you type in that address or click on our logo in their “online games” section. So now we have 2 identical websites and the perfect situation to use the canonical link element, but as far as I can tell, I can’t use it.
I have been trying my best to do everything the whitehat way, and as far as I know, there is nothing wrong with our site or our content. Megajogos is a site focused on Brazilian people and culture, and we have almost 500k pageviews a day, people play on our site from over 170 countries, and around 10k people are playing at any given time simultaneously (sometimes that number gets up to 15k) but we don’t show up in google for that keyword (we do show in the first and second page for many other keywords, and in some cases even at the very top of results).
Any suggestions?

By: Osborn Brook SEO

Osborn Brook SEO — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:44:59 +0000

This is really good news from Google as content duplication has always been a gray area for SEOs and developers. At least now we have some control or at least we can express our preferences. We've started using that in our Brighton seo and web design website at so have a look at the source code to see how it works.

By: Satya Prakash

Satya Prakash — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:14:03 +0000

What should one do for old content vs new content. where chance is that something will be same on both the page.
but I do not want to use 301 for historical reason,
And/Or
I am not sure of 301 redirect is good in this case or not?

By: SEO Essex

SEO Essex — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:54:30 +0000

Gotta say, I’m a big fan of this. Gotta love clean URL’s

Especially love the Drupal plug in! ;o)

By: Jaap van Duijn

Jaap van Duijn — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:05:45 +0000

Does the canonical-tag requires an absolute URL (‘http://www.domain.com/real-article/’) or could it also be relative (‘/real-article/’)?

By: Keith Davis

Keith Davis — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:56:34 +0000

Hi Matt
Thought I understood canonical url’s i.e. non www versus www site, and for static html sites I think it is fairly straightforward. I just verified the site with Google and using Webmaster tools, told Googlebot, which one I preferred.
But now that I’ve got into Wordpress… it’s like starting all over again.
Need to read this post again, watch the video, read a few other posts! looks like I’ll get back to you in about a months time when I may understand more on canonical url’s, duplicate content and Wordpress.

By: Online Business Ev

Online Business Ev — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:45:13 +0000

Man, I’m I glad I took all that time to name my links over the last 5 years! I guess I got lucky because I used software that recommended you take the time to name links and by the time I got into blogging, it was standard on the system I use.

By: matthew carson

matthew carson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:37:40 +0000

Question: Are canonical links or 301 redirects more appropriate in this case?

You have ppl entering a page with this link: http://www.domain.com/page.html

but you’d prefer them to enter here: http://www.domain.com/page.html#total

By: bob phillips

bob phillips — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:19:15 +0000

I think this might be a rather amateurish question. I got to your comments on canonical links because I was searching “web links”. What I want to know is – for a naive author of a simple blog – can I provide the reader with “paths” through my blog? What I want to do is to suggest to the reader, quite visibly, that if he/she has just read blog x, then bloq q might be a sensible one to read next, rather than going serially on to blog y. In fact, what I would like to be able to do is to say to the reader: “If you are interested in topic A, then I suggest you read in the sequence x, q, r, s, f ….; but if you are interested in topic B, then I suggest you read in the sequence x, y, j, k, l” Can I do that in the popualr blog software, Currently I am using the Blog software provided on One.com, the Danisk company founded by Jacob Jensen.

By: Chip D

Chip D — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:46:21 +0000

This may be a naive question, but here goes. I have installed a couple of Google Custom Search Engines on sites in which the search results are written to an iframe on a page called, “search.html.” In Google Analytics I see these page addresses, with long strings of stuff on the tail of a ?, likely because I have ga.js tracking code on the “search.html” page.

This is not creating duplicate content, is it? I don’t need to put rel=”canonical” in the of “search.html” pointing right back at “search.html,” as: , right?

Thank you for sharing!