Are you wondering what are canonical URLs and canonical tags? And how to use canonical tags precisely? Read this blog further to learn more about canonical URLs and its importance in terms of SEO
Canonical tag is not a brand-new term or concept in the SEO world. In fact, canonical is been into existence since 2009 which is considered a milestone for SEO. Search Engine biggies like Google, Bing and Yahoo came along together to create canonical tags. What's the motive of canonical tags in SEO? Canonical tags are created to help out website owners to solve duplicate content issue just with a one line code. Do canonical tags actually work? Yes, they do very efficiently. For a better understanding of canonical tags, SEO companies and experts recommend mastering SEO training or digital marketing training.
Canonical tag is just one line HTML code which is rel="canonical". Canonical tag or URL are used to indicate the main version of duplicate or similar or near-duplicate content to the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. To simply put, if you have one or more content in different URLs which resembles with one main page, then you can simply use canonical tags on the duplicate content pages to specify that this duplicate content has a main version or original content. This is often indicated with the URL of the main version or original piece of content.
The syntax of the canonical tag is given below which goes in the duplicate content page to refer to the main content.
<link rel="canonical" href="URL of Original Content"/>
Duplicate content often degrades the page quality and SERP rankings. It could also cause number of SEO problems. First and foremost thing is that Search Engine may miss out important pages which crawling too many duplicate pages. On the other hand, if your website is flooded with tons of duplicate content, then your website will not rank on Google anytime soon. So it is quite important to use canonical tags.
