Canonical link to be placed on original or duplicate ?

[indias next no1]

In another thread i mentioned that my G traffic is down, and degradation of my ranking.

now, i find that there are some pages indexed in google.

say for example :

i am having a web page like this : www.example.com/page.html

but google showing pages like www.example.com/page.html?some&words

with the same exact content of my page.html

i am not at all having a html page with parameter in it. i think this cause some duplicate issue.

so, i planned to place canonical link, but where should i place it ? whether in the original page.html or elsewhere ? because there is no parameter page available with me.

[tedster]

Place the canonical link in the head area of page.html - then even if it does somehow get linked to or accessed with extraneous query parameters, those URLs will not be indexed independently. The canonical link simply says "this is the URL for the content below - if you got here some other way, treat it as if you got here the way I'm stating."

It's not a problem if the canonical link shows up in both the original and the duplicate.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Place it in the original page itself. So whenever a parameter is passed that page would also contain the canonical tag.

[g1smd]

If your site does not use parameters, or uses only a small number of very specific parameters, then another way to solve this is to set up some redirects in your .htaccess file (assuming you use Apache, that is).

Just a few short lines of code can fix the URLs for the entire site. There are hundreds of code examples in the WebmasterWorld Apache forum.

[indias next no1]

thanks for the replies, i place it in original pages

[tedster]

Does this mean that, with your server configuration, that the canonical link will also appear when the extra query string parameters are added on to the URL? That is what is essential.