What does canonical mean in seo

Connect your SEO data with business data Find out more. Strategic help from tech SEO experts Find out more. Tristan Pirouz. Canonical tags are a powerful way to tell Google and other search engines which URLs you want them to index. They can prevent duplicate content issues if you have different versions of the same page: for example, an original and print version of the same page, session IDs or colour variations of the same product.

The canonical URL is the primary version of your content. The full set of canonical URLs on your site are created using a set of rules to ensure they are consistent. For example, you might decide that your canonical URLs should always end with trailing slash. In order for canonical tags to work properly, they must be used correctly and consistently:. This tag was introduced in when Google worked with Microsoft Bing and Yahoo to build a consensus to accept the canonical terms.

While this article will likely focus on using canonicals to help Google crawlers, know that the vast majority of search engines accept these tags. Simply put, duplicate content confuses search engines. When search engines look at multiple pages with the same content and no clear keyword optimization signals they:.

However, now many SEOs believe there is no real penalty. But you can easily resolve these issues and generate long-term SEO results by utilizing relative canonical URL best practices and knowing when to use this tag. Here are a few rel canonical examples that show when you should use this tag to identify duplicate content and meet best practices for SEO. If you have a website that is a part of a franchise or national organization, then you may share statements, press releases, and even blog content originally published on the main national website.

Instead of merely linking to the original content and hoping site visitors click through, you may publish the content on your own site. This is duplicate content that needs a canonical tag. One of your marketing strategies might include syndicating your existing content on other websites. Blog syndication helps you expand your brand awareness and reach while the publisher gets content for their pages.

However, syndicated content means your words are now spread across the internet on multiple pages. Without canonical URLs, search crawlers might not know which content came first and what to prioritize. You may test small details like the color of various buttons or big changes like the page layout or content. In some instances, Google could end up crawling both pages and be confused about which one to index as the original.

Canonical URLs serve as a roadmap to the original content. You can indicate your preferred canonical URL. However, Google may choose a different page than you do for various reasons. That said, in most instances, when set correctly, it will be your specified URL that is chosen as the canonical.

Put simply, canonical URLs dictate which page will usually except in the case where a duplicate is explicitly better suited for a user, let's say a mobile-specific version be shown in the search results.

Canonical tags aren't the only way that you can specify a canonical URL, despite being the most likely that you will use. That said, while these are all ways that are recommended by Google , they are not all suitable to use in every situation, as we will explore below, and each has its own recommended reasons for use.

Just so that you are aware, setting canonical URLs isn't a requirement, and in instances that you do not specify one, Google will use other signals to identify the page that they think is the best version.

However, it is recommended that you use canonicalization effectively, to ensure that you are able to control how your site appears on the search engines and to prevent issues that arise as a result of duplicate content. Before we look at the reasons why you should use canonical URLs and how to specify these across the most popular CMS', you need to understand why duplicate content exists in the first place.

No one sets out to create duplicate content within a site. Usually, this happens when content management systems create multiple URLs when you launch a page, when you have different versions of your site that are indexable, have an alternate version for different device types, or use dynamic URLs.

Take a look at the following URLs and assume that, to a user, they all display exactly the same content:. In fact, many sites have these issues without you even realizing it, but canonical URLs help search engines to identify different variations of a page as a single URL. Canonical URLs exist to help you deal with duplicate content issues that could affect the performance of your site. But, more specifically, there is a number of reasons why you should be using canonical URLs as just one technical SEO focus area:.

When you have duplicate or near-identical pages on your site, there is a chance that the individual URLs could earn links from external sources.

This, in itself, can help your site to rank given that signals otherwise distributed across multiple URLs are consolidated into one stronger page. It is not uncommon for content to be syndicated across different websites to place it in front of new audiences. To prevent duplicate pages from ranking on the SERPs and to ensure that the original piece of content is the one that ranks, you can use canonical URLs to consolidate ranking signals. Especially so if you are working with a large website with lots of pages, you can use canonical URLs to ensure that Googlebot spends time crawling your new pages rather than duplicated versions of the same one across mobile and desktop versions, as an example.

That said, crawl budgets aren't an issue for most sites unless you've got hundreds of thousands, or more, pages. Adding tags and HTML code might sound daunting if you re not a developer, but the majority of CMS platforms allow you to specify canonicals out-of-the-box.

If you are running a Magento 1 store, follow these steps to specify canonical URLs for products and categories. In many cases, you will find that this is already set to yes , which means you don't need to do anything else on this. Make sure that this is set to no so you will be able to manually specify the canonical URL for categories.