Canonical Links

Hi Jim,

I hope all is well.

I'm still chipping away at this SEO stuff and I still have this problem of my site sometimes being listed under my hosting company rather than the proper url. I don't know what triggers it, but it drives me crazy because I drop in rankings. I was surfing the web and came across this information on the MarketRaise Blog about canonical links and Google announcing support Feb '09 for this canonical link element. You know me, I don't know much html and I think you can designate the url as proper (main) or canonical (duplicate). MarketRaise showed this example and I need to do the opposite and declare the proper url rather than the duplicate.

<link href="http://www.example.com/product.php?id=neat-product" rel="canonical">

I'm thinking maybe I should put this in the header as:

<link href="http://www.mysite.com" rel="proper">

Have you seen this, what do you think?

Thanks,
Loretta

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Zone4Kids

Oops! Sorry Jim.

I checked the Webmaster Tools on Google. The canonical is used to indicate your preferred url. They show an example

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

So to indicate the proper url and avoid the duplicate content from my hosting company I would have to put in the header

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com"/>

They mention relative vs. absolute, but that is a concept I don't fully grasp. They said it is best to use absolute urls. Does that mean put the / after .com to set the preferred for all the content under the url or should I leave it off?

Also my only way to set this is to set it in the header using a template file which will insert it on all pages. I think I will shoot myself in the foot if I do that which I think would be telling Google that my home page is the preferred page and not to index the others. It seems that I have to get my hosting company involved to only set this on my home page.

I'm confused and frustrated that my site shows as a sub-directory to my host.

Thanks,
Loretta

__________________
Zone4Kids