Why we should Add same URL in Rel=Canonical Tag?

[steveschmidt85]

It is some sort of SEO and some what programming question. AS a seo guy i am posting it in SEO section, Moderator can move it in programming section if it suits there more.

I just want to know what exactly means while we put same page link in rel=canonical tag. I checked on word press blogs each category and tag url having same page(that specific tag and category) link in that page.

So lets suppose http://www.xyz.com/blog/tag/abc is my tag page url in that particular url same link is mentioned in rel=canonical tag what exactly that means.

[shailender]

I hope this page (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html) would resolve all your queries related to canonical url.

[steveschmidt85]

I hope this page (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html) would resolve all your queries related to canonical url.

not exactly. i have info about rel=canonical my question is somewhat different.

[deepsand]

not exactly. i have info about rel=canonical my question is somewhat different.

If you carefully read the page the shailender cited, you will find that it is precisely what you've inquired about.

Did you perhaps not understand that rel="canonical" is not a complete tag in itself, but is rather a portion of a <link> tag?

Or, were you asking re. the effect of placing

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.xyz.com/blog/tag/abc" />

on the page whose URL is http://www.xyz.com/blog/tag/abc? If so, the answer is that there is nothing to be gained by doing so, as the purpose of rel="canonical" is to ask that Google index a page under under a URL that is different from its actual one.

A commonplace use is to specify whether the page is to be indexed with or without the "www" service prefix.