Web Development and Canonical Links
In another post I talked about using Canonical Links on Magento to preserve the link juice in pages that are found both on their url key and on one or more category paths. But some people have wondered why they would need to do this. Well here is that explanation from Google.
Gotta love those guys at Google. This video goes for 20 minutes. The short version is that if you have a page that can be found at more than one url, (www.example.com/howto/ and www.example.com/tutorial/howto/), search engines that crawl your site won’t know that these should really be the same page. You will also get people that will backlink to both.
These cause the relevance and value of your page to be distributed across both url indexes of the search engines. Using canonical link tags tells the search engines that no matter where it came from or the path used to get to the page, that it should be indexed as the link specified in the canonical link tag.
This keeps all of the relevance and backlink and other types of link juice concentrated to the one URL specified.
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