What is a Canonical Tag and Why should I use it?

A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

This will alleviate duplicate content issues with your homepage for urls such as:
http://www.yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com/
http://www.yourdomain.com/Default.aspx
http://www.yourdomain.com/store/Default.aspx

Since all of these pages are the exact same page and same content we can use the canonical tag to tell Google (or Yahoo or Live) that you want all of the ranking or link juice to go to the url you specify as the canonical URL.

With the flexibility of AmeriCommerce's Generic Variable and Conditional Mergecode system you can specify your canonical tag on your homepage very easily.

1. Create a variable on your homepage to tell the site that it is on the homepage.

Do this by using the SET mergecode:

##SET[VARIABLENAME=TRUE]##

The variable name can be anything you like just so that YOU know what it means. For this example let's use

##SET[HOMEPAGE=TRUE]##

Insert this mergecode into any Custom HTML Snap-In on the homepage for your theme.

2. Add your conditional Mergecode statement to your Head Tags of your theme. This is in Themes > Active Theme > Global Settings.

##IF[HOMEPAGE=TRUE]##
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/" />
##ENDIF##