{"id":2395,"date":"2022-11-11T17:51:08","date_gmt":"2022-11-11T12:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hostkicker.com\/blog\/?p=2395"},"modified":"2022-11-19T15:17:24","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T09:47:24","slug":"introduction-to-canonical-tags-in-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hostkicker.com\/blog\/introduction-to-canonical-tags-in-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to Canonical Tags in SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you here to learn about canonical tags in SEO? Let’s get started.<\/span><\/p>\n

Canonical tags are essential to technical SEO<\/a> that can hamper or boost your site’s performance and internet presence.\u00a0<\/span>In order to keep your site’s SEO healthy, you must understand what canonical tags are and how you can use them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wondering why? Why use canonical tags?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is because poorly placed canonical tags or avoiding them altogether can cause issues that can hinder your site’s performance as well as ranking. That’s why we have created this write-up to discuss canonical tags in SEO. You’ll be able to answer what they are, how they function, and how you can use them on your site appropriately. <\/span><\/p>\n

The canonical tag was a collaborative creation of major firms like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo in 2009 to help website owners to fix the duplicate content issue<\/a> on websites that can be accessed via multiple URLs.<\/span><\/p>\n

These tags indicate to search engines the preferred version of the duplicate or similar content on your site to resolve the duplicate content issues quickly. <\/span>Let’s dive deeper into canonical tags in SEO.<\/span><\/p>\n

What are canonical tags in SEO?<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

In SEO, a canonical tag is an HTML code that informs search engines which URL, page, or content on your site is the canonical version (preferred or most important) among the duplicate or similar content on your site. It is also referred to as “rel canonical.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me put it this way- If your site contains different versions of the same topic or duplicates or near duplicate content under different URLs, you can use canonical tags to tell search engines the most important content of your site among them- the one that you want to get crawled and indexed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Using canonical tags, you can avoid issues arising due to duplicate or identical content on a site. To put it simply, it tells search engines which page you want it to rank on SERPs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The placement of the Canonical tags.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A canonical tag is placed in the header section of the page, just like this-<\/span><\/p>\n

<link rel= “canonical” href= “https:\/\/example.com”><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The first part- link rel= “canonical” suggests that the link in this tag is the canonical version of this page. And the second part- href= “https:\/\/example.com”- suggests that this URL is canonical.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is a canonical URL in SEO?\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

A canonical URL is the page URL that is set as the canonical version among duplicate versions using the HTML code to prevent content duplication issues. You can choose the canonical URL yourself, or else Google itself selects the one it thinks to be the most valuable.<\/span><\/p>\n

How is content assessed as duplicate?<\/span><\/h2>\n

To be considered as duplicate content, the pages must not be exactly identical. They can be considered duplicates even if they have minimum variations, such as variations caused due to sorting or filtering the products by price, color, type, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n

This doesn’t imply that you should avoid creating similar content. There may be many reasons for having similar content on a site or covering the same topic. Maybe both are created to fulfill different intents, or perhaps the latter is more advanced than the former one, or more. Whatever the reason, maybe you can keep them on your site without hurting your SEO by using canonical tags.<\/span><\/p>\n

How did Google choose canonical content?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Google tries to analyze the content of the page while indexing the site. If in case it discovers duplicate content on it, it chooses the one as the canonical version that it finds to be the most suitable and most valuable content among the duplicate ones. To decide, it considers various signals like Page quality, page secure version (HTTP or HTTPS), its listing in the sitemap, and the tags such as rel=canonical. You can also tell search engines your canonical version using the tags or other ways, and it will consider it as the main URL unless the other content is more relevant to the user’s query.<\/span><\/p>\n

For instance, even if the desktop version is set as the canonical URL, the mobile version is served to the user surfing from the mobile device.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The importance of using canonical tags in SEO<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

There are many reasons you must use canonical tags in SEO. The most important one is to avoid duplicate content issues that may hurt the site’s performance, and all the other issues revolve around this. Google has difficulties assessing duplicate content. It may be challenging for it to choose which one should be indexed, which version should be ranked for a particular query, and whether it should consolidate the “link juice” to one page or split it among all.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Also, duplicate content on your site may affect your site’s “crawl budget” as it may crawl your duplicate versions, again and again, wasting the budget that can be used for crawling the other important pages of your site. The canonical versions are crawled more frequently as compared to the duplicates, which are crawled less. This helps you maintain the crawling load on your site.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, if you do not use a canonical tag, Google may choose the canonical version itself, which may be the URL that you don’t want to get ranked.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can use Google’s\u00a0<\/span>URL Inspection tool<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to see which version of your content Google has chosen as the canonical version. Even if you have specified the canonical version, it is possible that Google may choose a different canonical version. There could be multiple grounds for this, including performance, content, and so on. Moving on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Using canonical tags, you can:<\/span><\/p>\n