Common Marketing & SEO Checklist SEO best practices and guidance to help your website perform online.
Why Establish Canonical URLs is important for your website and SEO
URL canonicalization is the specification of the original version of page content, and using the rel=”canonical” tag to point copies of that content back to the original.URL canonicalization helps you avoid duplicate content issues, since it tells search engines where to find the original content (which search engines prefer), and helps you consolidate ranking factors such as link juice on one page (rel=”canonical” tag tells search engines where to send link juice, trust and authority).
How to Establish Canonical URLs.
When you have pages with duplicate content, or content similar enough to be considered copies, add <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com” /> to the <head> of the duplicate page with the URL of the original page. Search engines try to honor this link, but it’s not a directive, so don’t use it in place of 301 or 302 redirects.URLs in the canonical link tag must be 100% matches to the actual canonical URL, so decide ahead of time if your URLs will use www., http/https, trailing slashes or not. Tell Google how to handle the www resolve by setting a preferred URL in Google Search Console.Each page can have only one rel=”canonical” tag – using more than one will cause search engines to ignore them all. And while you may think that your web pages are all unique, there are a number of common circumstances that can cause duplicate pages, so it’s often best to include self referencing canonical tags on all pages.
