Canonical URL is an SEO URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. This link will give you better idea. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonica...t-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Search engines can discover your web page from different path, which may raise duplicate content issue. To avoid this we set a preferred path or say canonical path for our web page using rel=canonical attribute. You can read this blog post to know how you can set canonical path, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Canonical URL is the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see. Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage. The typical example used is that most people treat the following URLs as the same: www.example.com example.com get more information at official google blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
preferred location of this url (the “canonical†location, in search engine speak) is example.com/page.html instead of example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265
its like taking the visitors from one page to another. its one kind of redirecting method nothing else. thanks
Canonical URLs refer to the fact that your site can be indexed more than one way - hxxp://www.mysite.com or hxxp://mysite.com. You should set your preference in Google Webmaster Tools so it is only indexed one way, thus avoiding duplicate pages.
It will help you avoid duplicate content penalties. It will send all your link juice to that one 'permalink' of a page that you want to rank high.
Canonical URL: the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.
The search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage.The typical example used is that most people treat the following URLs as the same: www.example.com example.com www.example.com/index.html example.com/home.asp
If you are defining canonical relation for any url that means search engines will treat this URL as main url to crawl and will cause duplication issues.
If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs the you need to address the page as canonical. It helps in identifying the crawler that this page might have similar content to that of any other url within the site. So it will not make them penalize as duplicate content. It is highly advisable for e-commerce sites and blogs
Canonical URL can be explained as the search engine friendly URL, easier accepted by Search engine and grabbed by crawlers. general is Static but dynamic URL
Canonical URL: the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.
Basically to say to crawlers that this page is a copy of the original page. Most of the time canonical tags are used to identify that yourwebsite.com/page_1.html is the same as yourwebsite.com/page-1.html