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Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, We are going to return to canonicalisation and how
to correctly implement the canonical link element.
The principle behind canonicalisation link elements is to normalise your URL's, this
then helps search engines decide which of your pages is the authority for a particular
piece of information and also allows Google to direct any link juice to the correct URL
helping you search engine positions.
These can be important for content management systems and eCommerce website that generate
identical pages with different URL's. We have previously done a more in depth video on canonicalisation
and webmaster tools blog also have an excellent video with Matt Cutts from Google explaining
the principles, both of these are linked from the supporting blog post.
We have created a simple piece of php code which allows your to canonicalise your website
quickly and easily, this weeks tutorial will show the installation and you can get the
code from the blog post.
The implementation on this dynamic canonical link element is for php apache servers, it
will allow you to tell Google which page is the authority for the content displayed.
The code does this in 2 ways, firstly It shows the full domain ie. www.domain.co.uk, so you
have no issue with Google treating domain.co.uk as the primary source of content. You can
also specify this in webmaster tools or use a .htaccess file to re-direct.
Secondly, if you have folder on your server, for example /downloads/canonical/ and you
want this folder to be classed as the authority, you can use the code supplied.