What is Canonical tag and URL?
Search engines introduce the canonical link to prevent duplicate content.
It is placed in the <head> section of our site and use like this :
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://rtpanel.com/developers/program /”>
Just a small description:
Example: like in above eg, if we are having a same content on two different URLs, then Google will get confused which link to crawl first and to display on search result. Hence canonical tag comes into the picture.
Search engine first have to crawl and index the first page to understand that there is a canonical tag on the page. Once they crawl it and find the canonical tag, then they can add to index that the page has moved.
Something more:
Canonical URL is more like similar to 301 redirection. But canonical URL process is a bit slower than the 301 redirect. It takes much time to index a moved page with the help of canonical tag.
If we used a 301 redirect, the spider would automatically be redirected from the original page to the new page, so there would be no indexing or crawling of the original page to cross check if there is a canonical tag on that page.
Refer this : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
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