What is the use of Canonical tag?

Hello all, I have listened from someone about Canonical tag. but, because of lack of time, he can't explain me about this. can you explain in brief about Canonical tag.

I will be thankful to you for this.

I appreciate all your answer and reviews.

Thanks in advance.

Actually the canonical tags allow you to have duplicate content pages on your site with the different urls and not get hit with duplicate content issues. It helps to protect your site from the Google ban.

Can you please give me an example of website where you have used canonical tag.

Well, According to my knowledge Canonical tag is used for handle the issue of duplicate content.When your website have two url with same contents then Canonical tag is useful. In this situation give a reference to your original url in the duplicate page with using canonical tag. Google will give more credit to your original page than the duplicate page and you will take away from risk of penalization for duplicate content. It is helpful for your site.

Canonical tag is useful when your website have two URL with same contents. In this situation you have to just give a reference to your original URL in the duplicate page with using canonical tag. Google will always provide more importance to your original page than the duplicate page and also you will take away from risk of penalization for duplicate content. It is helpful in duplicate content problems.

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL, to present to the search engines when there are multiple choices available. Typically a search engine, such as Google will attempt to pick the best URL that they feel is the authority for that page.

Simple you can say that your website as www dot abc dot com and when your website lunched browser show you as www dot abc dot com/index dot htm

You can see the same contents in both URL but Google will read it as two URL pages having same content that can be very risk to get good rank or to avoid Google penalty.

For any page on your website, the canonical tag sets the preferred URL. This is useful for situations where your content management system uses various URLs for the same page or you have pagination for multiple pages of the same topic.

In my opinion canonical tag is used to avoid duplicate URl problem

Code used by search engine crawlers/spiders to tell search engines what URL is the original version of your webpage

You can use canonical tag for similar pages and search engine will not those pages as duplicate pages. Recently we have seen that duplicate pages are highly spammed by search engines, but if you tell search engine management about it, they will not be considered as duplicate pages or contents. It is done via canonical URL.

Cannonical tag helps search engine to identify that the url are are same and it wont count the url as two different urls.

For eg: www.abc.com or www.abc.com/default.html or www.abc.com/index.html or http://abc.com

are nothing but one site only but search engine thinks that they are different pages.

But how do we 'show' bots where is our original url/content? I just practice this tag but on my google webmaster tool doesn't show any errors .. anyone knows about it please share!

A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

The point is the content isn't duplicated and there is a canonical link for each of the two pages concerned. One page has the url like keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.php and one has keyword1_keyword2_keyword3.php
Both pages have content which is different but relevant to the keywords. Hope this help, dude.