Every page on your website should have a single URL associated with it. The main reason for that is that Search Engines penalize websites with duplicate content (i.e. same content on different URLs).
When to use web page redirection
The most simple and basic example of 2 URLs that may be pointing to the same web page is if both “www.yoursite.com” and “yoursite.com” point to your website.
You should choose one of the 2 URLs for your site (it doesn’t really matter which one) and setup a permanent redirect from the second version of the URL to the correct one (to the one you chose).
This is the best practice for optimum SEO.
When to use canonical URLs
Another simple example is if you have a same web page that belongs to different categories on your site – so for example if “yoursite.com/tools/yourpage” and “yoursite.com/tips/yourpage” point to the same page.
There is nothing wrong in this type of setup per say – for example you may run a blog and have your content categorized in such a way, or you may run a store with the same products belonging to a number of categories. What you need to do in this case is tell Search Engines which one of all these URLs they should index. That’s called a canonical URL 
.
That way other URLs with the same content won’t get indexed and your site won’t be penalized for duplicate content.
Keep it simple
Like most things with SEO, duplicate content and canonical URLs is a pretty simple concept that’s just common sense. Don’t listen to “SEO professionals” and other gurus pretending that things aren’t so simple.
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SEO Basics – The Duplicate Content Issue is a post from: Noam Design
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