Canonical tags are an element of HTML that help websites prevent duplicate content issues for search engines like Google. They are part of technical SEO and are used to specify the preferred/canonical version of a web page.
When there are multiple URLs that lead to the same content or very similar content on a website, search engines may have trouble determining which version is the original canonical version that should be indexed and ranked. This can dilute a page’s ranking signals across the duplicates.
The canonical tag allows you to tell search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results. It looks like this:
By adding this tag to the HTML head section of non-canonical pages, you are indicating to search engines that the specified URL is the master version they should index and pass ranking signals to.
Using canonical tags properly helps avoid duplicate content issues that can negatively impact a site’s crawling and indexing. It consolidates ranking signals to a specified canonical version rather than diluting them across duplicates. This in turn can help improve a page’s visibility in search for its target keywords.
Overall, canonical tags are an important technical SEO element for controlling indexing and reducing duplicate content problems that can hamper search visibility.
