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I have two pages with same content and same meta title and meta description. They also have very simular URL:
http://www.mysite.com/new-yorkhttp://www.mysite.com/new_yorkI need first link to be "official".
To avoid having duplicated pages, I want to add canonical meta tag in header but on which page? Does it have to be on both of them or only on second? On first?
Can you give me some advice please?
You should normally always opt to use dash vs underscores in URL's due to the fact that Google treats dash as a true word separator, through technically Google can make sense of both.
Matt Cutts explains the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL.
From Google Support…
Add a rel="canonical" link to the section of the NON-canonical version of each HTML page.
Find that, and more here…
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/new-york> Copy this link into the <head> section of the page www.mysite.com/new_york . Adding this link and attribute let you to suggest to Google: "Of all the two pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results."
Just on one of the pages. I would add to the second one as using a dash (-) seems "cleaner" perhaps.
You need to add it to the /new_york page:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/new-york" />
You may add it to the canonical page /new-york itself, too (in addition, that is!). From the RFC 6596: "The Canonical Link Relation":
The target (canonical) IRI MAY:
[…]
o Be self-referential (context IRI identical to target IRI).
If you don’t need the duplicate page/URL: instead of using rel-canonical, it would be better to 301-redirect /new_york to /new-york.
