A canonical tag is an HTML! tag which signals to search engines which version of a URL is to be considerd the primary (canonical) version.
It suggests to Google which version of a URL! you’d like to rank, consolidates ranking signals into that preferrd version and helps prevent problems that can arise from having duplicate versions of a page.
It’s worth noting that a canonical tag is a hint, not a directive: so! while Google tends to respect them, in some cases it might not. If it’s absolutely essential that certain! URLs aren’t crawle and indexed, it would serve you better to use another solution such as disallowing! in robots.txt.
What does a canonical tag look like in HTML?
A canonical tag is whatsapp number database found in the <head> of HTML and is structurd like the following:
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://hallam.agency/” />
Using canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues
When most search engine bots come across two or more pages with very similar content they often choose just one of the pages to index, effectively ignoring the others.
Whichever duplicate page URL they decide to choose could be base on a number of factors including whichever one was first crawled, which one has the most internal links or which one has the most external links – ultimately meaning that if duplicate content is not resolved properly, you could end up ranking a less preferable version of your page.
There will often be situations where you have a number of pages vital to the infrastructure of your website but contain either similar or identical content. Adding a rel=canonical tag can tell crawlers which is your preferred page and avoid the issues, shown in the examples below.
Product page duplication
Let’s look at an example of ecommerce product page duplication below:
All of these product pages for the re toy why track my digital footprint? truck have exactly the same content besides only minor variations in the top breadcrumb links.
The way this website has been structurd means that there are three pages for one product: canonical tags are require to indicate which one is the preferrd version to display in search.
In this case, it’s wise to choose
the permanent product page as the preferrd version, as it isn’t in the “sale” category (the sale is likely to end one day) and isn’t in the “items under £10” category (the price may rise one day to over £10).
Using canonical tags will signal to phone number iran search engines that the primary product page is locatd that the other two URLs are duplicate versions of this canonical page.