What is the use of canonical tag? and how to use them?
The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective. In essence, you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a 301 does), without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL
<link rel="canonical" href="https://website link" />
We use canonical tag normally when our website have duplicate pages then it's important to tell search engines which copy is the master copy after that search engines transfer all of the link & content metrics to that master copy URL.
Suppose any website have same content in two pages then you can use this tag to tell search engine, which-one is the original one and which one is copied.
Ex-
page1.html and page2.html
Suppose both are duplicate then google will get confuse, which page should be rank or not. Suppose you want page2.html to rank then use the below code on page1.html to tell search engines about master page.
<link rel="canonical" href="page2.html" />
When google crawl page1.html then it automatically understand the page2.html is preferred version.
Duplicate content is a big NO to search engines. Having pages of identical or very similar content on your website is seen as a negative, and may be used by Google to devalue your website when determining rankings. If you use https on your site, utilize a content management system like Wordpress or Drupal, or run an eCommerce website, the combination of different URLs people can use to access your website opens you up to a major SEO vulnerability if not properly addressed. By properly employing canonical tags to pages on your site, you can avoid this pitfall and take full advantage of both a robust site and streamlined Search Egine Practices.
Canonical element called the canonical link is an HTML element that helps webmaster prevent duplicate content issue. It does this by specifying the canonical or preffered version of a webpage .
hi all
i know this topic is old, but i wanna to explain more about canonical tag.
if you don't use this tag, Google maybe tells you're duplicator, because Google says that these URLs are duplicate :
http://123.com
http://123.com/
http://www.123.com
http://www.123.com/
https://123.com
and etc
so, if we don't use canonical tag, then maybe google declare us as a duplicator
this is just one of the all points to use this tag
you can use this for paging, ordering, categories and etc
A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.
Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs.
Quote from: krishnanayak on 08-10-2016, 00:23:03
What is the use of canonical tag? and how to use them?
Simply put, duplicate content confuses search engines. When search engines look at multiple pages with the same content and no clear keyword optimization signals they:
Don't know which piece to assign credit to
Don't know what to index
Don't know which pages should rank
A rel=canonical tag clarifies this, helps search engines understand the content, prevents them from ignoring the page, and improves the chances the content will be ranked.
The Canonical tag is an HTML tag or code which is used to remove duplicate content. This tells the search engine to ignore duplicate URL and only to consider the URL which is defined in canonical tag.
It is used to tell search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.
When the different URL's have the same Contents on the Website, The Search engine will consider that It's a " Duplicate Content " issue. So There is a way to solve this in SEO through the Canonical tag.
Why is it used?
—As duplicate content is a big turnoff for the search engines. So, to avoid duplicate content issues we use the canonical tag and in this, we pick one URL as the main URL for all the duplicate content. This avoids the confusion for the search engine crawlers as they get to know which content is canonical and which one is copied. So, in this way, canonical tag can be used even when you have duplicate URLs pointing to the same content without harming the ranking of your website.
A canonical tag represents the search engines that a specific URL. Is an important part of any SEO strategy.