Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced support in February 2009 for the Canonical tag, which allows you to reduce the risk that the search engines will see multiple content on your sites.

In the HTML source, a canonical tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/swedish-fish" />

A Canonical tag is not shown visibly on the webpage, but is used by search engines when they crawl the site to determine which of several seemingly identical pages is the 'right' one.

For example, if you have a set of product pages, and for a particular product you can reach it via the usual parameter-based method, or via a DirectURL, you will probably want to set the Canonical to point to the DirectURL. That way, the PageRank for both versions of the page will be given to the DirectURL version, and the search engines will link to the Canonical, DirectURL version.

How to use the Canonical tag

neatComponents provides support for the canonical tag in two places.

For general pages:

• The system uses the first DirectURL as the Canonical

and, for dynamically generated pages from Tables, via the

• Custom View or
• Sale View.

The canonical value should be the fully qualified url, ie starting http:// or https://, rather than just the relative DirectURL part.