What is canoncial url..? is this affect seo rankings? p?

[Karthick]

Hi
My site is http://www.karaikudi.info . Recently its getting down in seo. While doing audit I found one reason. But I don't know how to implement. Reason is below.
Your page not uses a canonical URL
Why is this important? Pages that do not use canonical URLs are susceptible to duplicate content issues, which can negatively impact search engine rankings. Recommendation: Your page generates duplicate content because it does not use a canonical URL. We recommend using a 301 HTTP redirect to point all duplicate entry points to a canonical URL.

Any one please help me.. thanks in advance

[Xpert Web Infotech]

Basically, it's used when you have different URLs that point to the same content, without actually redirecting. So let's say your domain is example.com. http://www.example.com and example.com are two different URLs, and if you don't redirect them all to a "standard" (canonical) URL (example.com), search engines treat the two URLs as completely different pages. This causes the popularity of the two URLs to be split (i.e. they don't share any link popularity), which is obviously very bad for SEO.

[Anil]

Hi Karthick,

As your website provides listing and so possibilities of duplication is also high.

Canonical Tag Format: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/xyz.html/" />

Canonical Tag is used to avoid duplication, we place canonical tag in meta section of duplicate page to tell search engine that this page is duplicate and the original path is xyz.

Better use 301 Permanent Redirection for immediate results. .htacces file need to be modified for 301 redirection.

Hope this will help you

Kind Regards,
Anil Varma