GSI Mythbuster: Brad Cohen (@supnah)
Myth: The new Canonical Link Element is a tool for redirecting, like a 301 permanent redirect.
The Canonical Link Element is not a solution for redirecting URLs. It does not function like a 301 and cannot redirect a user to a new URL.
Here is Matt Cutts’ explanation of it:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
Ever since its introduction the SEO world has been abuzz with talk of how to use the Canonical Link Element. Improper use of this element can cause serious damage to your ranking and potentially cause Google to stop indexing your pages. This is especially true for the next couple of months. After that point we are told that Google will have learned to recognize improper use and it will be more likely that improper implementations will just be ignored.
Here what the tool can do:
The Canonical Link Element is a solution for duplicate indexing of variations of a single URL on your site.
A good example of when the Canonical Link Element can be effective is in the case of a website using Session IDs which create the potential for infinite variations of root URLs with suffixes added for tracking purposes. All of these infinite URLs can be indexed and treated as unique by the search engines. In this case there is no actual duplicate content, just the potential for indexing of the same content from the same html page multiple times.
The element itself looks like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://sample.com/index.html” />
This code is inserted between the <head> </head> elements on the page and indicates the preferred URL address.
By implementing the Canonical Link Element you can tell the search engines that all of these variations of the root URL created by the Session ID tracking suffixes should resolve and contribute their page equity to the non-Session ID version of the URL.
To be clear - the user will not be redirected, and pointing to any URL other than the URL of the HTML page in which the element sits has the potential to damage your ranking and crawlability.
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