Do you use the canonical tag on your websites?

[MichaelCorfman]

Duplicate content has been an important topic for Google and other search engines and for webmasters for a while. One of the tools introduced to allow webmasters to identify instances of duplicate content was the rel=canonical tag first announced and supported by Google, Yahoo, and Bing in February 2009. Here is Matt Cutts blog post about the announcement: Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes.

Four years later, duplicate content has continued to be a hot topic. And there are still plenty of questions around about how and when to use the rel=canonical tag. Just a few weeks ago there was a (good) article on the topic on the seomoz website outlining some of the confusion. Here is a link to that article: Rel=Confused?

So, for this week's poll question I thought I'd ask if you use the canonical tag on your websites? Besides sharing whether or not you use the tag, I'd be interested understanding the philosophy folks follow around the use of the tag (if you have one), and when you use the rel=canonical tag versus redirects.

Michael

[gayle]

I always use a canonical link as it was a lesson learned when I first set up my site. My custom designer ommitted to tell me about the clink value, so all
my 150 pages where set up with gamerism.com/temporary.html at first. It was months and I could not figure out why google was not indexing my
page, but for the home page. I got frustrated and went to my webmasters forum where some keen-eyed member pointed out that each page should have the same canonical link as your file name. After a manual effort page by page, it was within 10 days, I was on G's index cycle and never looked back. Hope this helps others.

[Roulette Zeitung]

Hello,

i am using the canonical link. It will generated by my German wpSEO plugin.



Leopold

[ocreditor]

on non-responsive sites we do

[lowrisk]

I don't presently use rel=canonical on my main site, but I have used it for others. I will admit it took me a while to figure it out and after a good few video watches I was confident to use it. Another tag to look into from google is the rel=next rel=prev for paginated content. Say you had five pages of bookmakers. Rather than PR being diluted over the 5 pages, it will be concentrated to the first page. If anyone want to learn more, google's blog is a good place to start....

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...d-relprev.html

[dfiocch]

I used rel=canonical tag before.
But, sincerely, I can't see benefits or penalties using it.
Personally, I prefer more "useful" tags such as rel=next or rel=prev for paginated contents.

[wheeloffortune]

I don't see any need to use it