One of the most effective tools in the dynamic world of SEO that always falls under the radar is the canonical tag.
It happens to be one of the smallest pieces of HTML code but potentially makes a world of difference in the functionality of your website, especially regarding content duplication and search rankings.
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We shall describe here in detail canonical tags-why they are important for SEO, their use, and what the ultimate strength is for SEO in your website.
A canonical tag is an HTML tool that helps website owners prevent duplicate content issues by telling search engines which version of a page is the main one.
This ensures that the correct page gets prioritized in search results. It essentially tells search engines which version of a URL to index and display higher in the results.
A canonical tag is especially helpful when multiple URLs point to the same content or when several pages have content that’s quite similar.
It ensures search engines focus on the right page without getting confused by the duplicates.
For example, suppose your website has two URLs that show the same content:
To the user, these URLs are different but represent the same content.
Without a canonical tag, search engines may interpret them as two different pages, which can create problems like keyword cannibalization, division of page rank, or even penalties due to duplicate content.
The use of canonical ensures the fact that the search engines realize which URL to give preference over.
There are several reasons why canonical tags are critical in improving your website’s SEO:
When the same or similar content shows up on different URLs, it can confuse search engines and hurt your chances of ranking well in search results.
This can lead to lower visibility for your content. In such cases, they also have to decide which version to index and rank.
Worse still, a wrong decision could make you lose ranks because search engines may not favor the one that best represents your brand.
Canonical tags help your website consolidate ranking signals by presenting a preferred URL, which will prevent duplicate content from damaging your website’s performance.
2. Improving Crawl Efficiency
Search engines have bots that are sent out to crawl the websites, but no website has a limitless crawl budget.
This is essentially the time and resources a search engine allocates in crawling your site.
In the event that your website contains many pages with duplicate or similar content, it may ensure that the search engine wastes valuable crawl budget on visiting multiple versions of the same page.
Using canonical tags allows you to guide search engines toward the version of your content you want them to prioritize.
It ensures they focus on the right page. This will, therefore, maximize your crawl budget as well as ensure important pages are indexed properly and promptly.
3. Consolidating Link Equity
If you have multiples of the same page, that page’s backlinks are then split across all the various URLs.
In other words, instead of having one good, high-ranking page, you might end up having multiple low-ranking pages.
Canonical tags come in very handy because canonical tags aggregate link equity or “link juice” from multiple URLs and collect it into one URL and then crank up that single version’s ranking potential.
SEO is about optimizing to rank better on the search engines, but it’s also about creating the best user experience.
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Adding canonical tags will ensure users are directed to the most relevant and very consistent authoritative version of a page, which suggests content integrity without confusion and delivers a seamless user experience.
Although Google says it doesn’t directly penalize duplicate content, having duplicate pages can still negatively affect your rankings in an indirect way.
It can weaken your search visibility and make it harder for search engines to figure out which page to prioritize.
And if search engines cannot determine which version of a page to index, they might decide to rank none of them, leading to lost search traffic.
The danger of having duplicate pages is eradicated with the help of canonical tags because these tags guide the search engine in indexing the right page.
Canonical tags are not required on every page but are useful in the following:
Use a canonical tag to indicate your preferred version when you have related pages spread over several different
URLs-for example, the default ID in dynamic URLs with session IDs or tracking parameters.
If you publish to another domain from the site, be sure to include canonical tags.
This way, if one of those sites gets de-indexed by the search algorithms for duplicating content, the other one won’t receive any penalties about it, and the link value flows right to the original article.
If your both the HTTPS and HTTP versions of the site are accessible, then you would need to point out that the HTTPS version is the canonical version to avoid dilution of your SEO work.
In this scenario, whenever parameters of URLs, like filtering or sorting products, create different addresses for the URL, canonical tags will not enable search engines to regard each different version as a different page.
Applying canonical tags is by no means complicated. The tag should be placed within the HTML <head> section of the webpage, referencing the preferred URL. Here is an example:
html
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<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com/page1″>
This line of code lets a search engine know which one would be the canonical version of the page, namely “https://www.example.com/page1”, while other versions of this page should not be indexed separately.
Here are the best practices you should follow to ensure effective use of canonical tags.
Always use absolute URLs (including the https:// or http://) rather than relative URLs. This ensures clarity for both search engines and crawlers.
Make sure all pages reference the canonical URL, and you are not pointing any similar content across multiple pages, particularly if you’re using a pagination feature in your website, such as page one, page two.
You should make sure that all pages take advantage of self-referencing canonical tags.
Using cross-domain canonical tags can be used to point back to the source when there is content syndicated or reused in other domains, thereby favoring the ranking of the original version of the content over the republished versions.
You should also audit the deployment of your canonical tags through Google Search Console or third-party SEO crawlers like Screaming Frog.
Lack of proper implementation of canonicals causes ambiguity for search engines, sometimes resulting in confusion over ways of indexing or ranking.
While both canonical tags and 301 redirects help consolidate duplicate content, they are used in different scenarios:
Sometimes it is just best to use a 301, but this should only be used when the content has made the page obsolete.
However if the two versions of a page do have a good use then canonical tags are in order.
In addition to being a great means to an end, mistakes in implementation can really prevent canonical tags from working. Here are some of the most common mistakes not to make:
Canonical tags are a very useful tool in the SEO activities toolbox and can help a website avoid duplicate content penalties, consolidate link equity, improve crawl efficiency, increase search engine visibility, and offer a more effective user experience.
Implementing canonical tags correctly will increase your website’s search engine’s chances of finding it and offer a more effective user experience.
Although they may seem like a small point in the whole scheme, as far as SEO goes, that is big enough to make canonical tags the ultimate SEO boost for your website.
Whether it is an immense ecommerce site or even a small-sized blog, proper canonical tags must be established to optimize the overall performance of the site.
