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Canonical URL in SEO

by | Jan 24, 2020 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Canonical URL in SEO

Canonical URL in SEO

Just a quick reminder, Canonical URL in SEO is a piece of one channel in Digital Marketing. It is introduced by various search engines. Since 2009 it is a part of a decade to solve duplicate content issues quickly and easily.

What is Canonical URL in SEO

A Canonical tag (or) URL is included in the HTML code of a webpage which indicates the original source of the content. When you have two pages with similar/duplicate content within your website. 

By adding a canonical URL that will tell search engines which page is the master copy and which page is duplicate. It is the best practice to have a canonical URL on your website if not it may hurt your website performance. 

How to implement canonical URL on your website

It is simple to implement but the first thing you need to identify the page you want to index in search engines. It could be the version that gets more traffic to your website.

Other/similar pages will point to this page as original content because search engines will look at duplicate pages. Below is an example of how to add a canonical tag in HTML.

Tag attribute of canonical URL in HTML

<head>

<link rel=“canonical” href=“insert canonical URL here” />

</head>

The above canonical tag syntax displays in the following URL

Canonical Tag

The above image shows the URL is canonical. Having this tag on your website search engine will ensure the page and it will not count as a duplicate content.

Do Canonical URL affect SEO

A Canonical URL helps webmasters to prevent duplicate content issues to rank high on search engines. Obviously, a unique URL will affect your SEO in two ways.

  • It will directly influence your website to display on SERP
  • It will boost your search traffic, rankings, and user experience.

What are the common issues of duplicate content

Below are the general causes of similar content within your website. If you have these issues on your website because it may harm your search rankings on SERP (Search engine results page).

            Causes                    URLs
1. Search Parameters1. example.com?q=search-term
2. Session ID’s2. https://example.com?sessionid=3
3. Separate printable version of the page 3. example.com/print/page
4. Post under different categories4. example.com/specials/SEO/
5. Pages for different device types5. M.example.com
6. AMP and non-AMP version6. amp.example/page
7. Same content at Http and https7. https://example.com and http://www.example.com

Doing the above mistakes will make possible to get referral traffic but it affects your rankings with wrong/duplicate URL SEO Review Tool is the best canonical URL checker.

Conclusion:

Canonical URL in SEO is quick and easy to implement because they make a huge difference in how search engines see your websites on SERP. If you haven’t implemented this tag on your website the above article will help you to prevent duplicate issues from your website.

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