The canonical URL is a crucial notion that is frequently misunderstood and misused, even by seasoned SEOs with years of experience.
A canonical URL is the URL of the page on your site that Google considers to be the most representative of a group of duplicate pages.
What is canonical URL?
In technical terms, canonical URLs are just HTML link tags with the rel=canonical attributes. Search for rel=”canonical” in the source code of a webpage to see this. It’s a feature that only search engines can discover.
A canonical URL is a link element that tells search engines that multiple URLs are linked to the same master page. In a nutshell, they allow you to choose which version of a URL should appear in search results. This is useful for preventing duplicate content from having a negative effect on rankings.
How should Google choose which version of a page to index and rank?
Too much duplicate content, as well as low-quality content, is obviously bad for your website.
Your “crawl budget” may be impacted if you have too much duplicate content. As a result, Google may spend more time indexing several versions of the same page than crawling other key information on your site.
So if you want google to focus your website effectively, Why would you want Google to waste time indexing numerous versions of the same page rather than focusing on your website’s most important pages?
Here comes the canonical URL.
Why is Rel=Canonical beneficial to SEO?
When search engines see several pages with the same contents (duplicated content), they are confused as to which page to index and rank. as a result they ignore those pages. To improve the user experience and meet search intent, Google simply filters out duplicate results from ranking.
However, by following relative canonical URL best practices and knowing when to utilize this tag, you can simply remedy these difficulties to preserve your SEO value.
When to use a canonical URL?
- When you republish your old content.
- When you do A/B test with different Pages
- To keep track of content that has been syndicated. You want to make sure that your preferred URL appears in search results if you syndicate your content for publishing on other domains for marketing purpose. The social media like Medium are providing the facility to add the canonical URL.
- To tell users the URL they should view in search results.
General rules for all canonicalization methods:
The following are the guidelines recommended by Google
- The robots.txt file should not be used for canonicalization.
- Don’t canonicalize with the URL removal tool. It clears Search of all variants of a URL.
- Don’t use the same or different canonicalization approaches to define various URLs as canonical for the same page (for example, don’t specify one URL in a sitemap but a different URL for the same page using rel=”canonical”).
- Noindex should not be used to prevent the selection of a canonical page. This directive is used to remove a page from the index, not to manage the canonical page selection.
- When using hreflang tags, specify a canonical page. Specify a canonical page in the same language, or the best available substitute language if a canonical for the same language does not exist.
- When linking within your site, use the canonical URL rather than a duplicate URL. Linking to the URL you want to be canonical on a regular basis helps Google understand your preference.
- Non-canonical pages should not be included in a sitemap. Only include canonical URLs in your sitemap if you’re using one.
Noindex Robots vs. Canonical URLs
The canonical tag informs search engines that this is the only version of the page available. The robots noindex tag instructs search engines not to index the page.
Is it best to use Canonical URLs or Noindex Robots Meta Tags to deal with duplicate content?
You may tell search engines not to scan your sites using meta tag SEO and a robots meta tag, which may appear to be a quick cure. In most circumstances, though, the more pages on your website that Google can crawl, the better. So it’s usually advisable to use noindex for pages that you do not aim to rank or receive traffic for.
What’s the Difference Between Canonical URLs and 301 Redirects?
in simple, A 301 Redirect tells the search engine that the page has been moved permanently, that it should be removed from the index, and that any SEO credit earned should be transferred to the new page.
A Canonical Attribute informs a search engine that a document contains many copies of the same content.
What are the ways for implementing the canonical URL ?
There are number of ways to implement the canonical URL in your website easily, the following are the most easy steps methods to do.
Use a WordPress plugin
if your website is build with WordPress platform the the plugins like Yoast, RankMath, All in one SEO etc., to implement the code they provide the facility by default.
Use the code in the website header
If you are familiar with coding then this is easy to go with a small code snippets can be used to add rel=canonical tags to your website. To set the canonical URL as soon as crawlers land on your page, add the following code to your page header
<link rel=”canonical” href=”inserturl.com<?php echo $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’];?>”>
Through Google Tag Manager
The Custom HTML tag in the google tag manager helps you to complete the job, the Moz website has a good article on how to implement the canonical URL via GTM please check that.
