How do canonical tags work

Also, John Mueller at Google has suggested previously that this is best practice. So, for example, all of these URLs would show the same content:. For example, it may be that a piece of your content is published on another website as the webmaster feels that it would be relevant to their users. Say you head into Google Search Console and find a number of pages — s will fix this.

Simply find a new location, put the redirect together and upload it to the server. Unlike a redirect, a canonical tag does not tell the server to send a user to another page — this is a signal to search engines to show them the preferred page you would like your user to see. Often there are situations where multiple pages are required despite the content being very similar, the most basic example would be on an ecommerce site:. Both pages serve the same content, are very useful to the user and have to be on the site to ensure your products can be listed by price and in alphabetical order.

If you are unsure whether to do a redirect or set a canonical, what should you do? The answer is simple: you should always do a redirect unless there are technical reasons not to. Canonical tags can help improve SEO by ensuring that Google knows which of your pages it should consider most important and which should be indexed, but you need to be very careful when implementing them.

If you need help with your SEO don't hesitate to contact us. How to use canonical tags properly. What are canonical tags? How search engines deal with duplicate or similar pages When most search engines come across two or more pages with very similar content they often choose just one of the pages to index, effectively ignoring the others.

Many URLs for the same webpage content Web pages can safely reference themselves There are many ways for a website to have multiple URLs for exactly the same web page. How to set up a canonical tag Decide which page you want to be your preferred URL. This should be the version you think is the most important. Common mistakes with canonical tags The misuse of canonical tags can result in dire consequences. Here are some common mistakes we have come across with canonical tags: Having a non-dynamic canonical tag on every page of the website pointing to one URL an SEO killer!

Should a page have a self-referencing canonical URL? Often there are situations where multiple pages are required despite the content being very similar, the most basic example would be on an ecommerce site: Page One — example.

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You may also like. Team Hallam Canonicals or redirects — which one to use? Pete Keyworth Anatomy of a great ecommerce product page. Contact us. Have you just learned something new?

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Essential Essential. Essential cookies are absolutely necessary for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. This cookie is used for determining whether it should continue serving "Always Online" until the cookie expires. There are dozens of situations that can lead to unintentional duplicate content. A few of the most common causes are:. Because it can be difficult to identify technical duplicate content issues on your site, you should use a duplicate content checker to find problems.

In some instances, you may want to set up a redirect instead of a canonical URL. A redirect automatically sends site visitors to a new URL when they click on an old link. The vast majority of times, you would use a redirect if you are consolidating content into your archives or updating your URL or webpage. However, if you still want people to access the page, even if the content is duplicated, then you need a canonical URL instead. Another way you may want to resolve duplicate content issues is by blocking search engines from crawling the page in the first place.

Through meta tag SEO and a robots meta tag, you can tell search engines not to crawl your pages, which may seem like quick a fix. In most cases, however, the more pages Google can crawl on your website, the better. Now that you understand why you would want to use a canonical tag and how it can help you, it is time to add this tag to your own site. There are multiple ways to do this depending on the plugins that you use and your comfort level of adding code to your website.

If multiple people have access to the pages, then they could be adding tags in different ways, which could lead to even more SEO problems. If you have a WordPress site, install the free plugin and easily add a canonical tag through the edit page or post section. You can place the code in your page header to establish the canonical URL as soon as crawlers land on your page:. If you have multiple tags on your website, then you can manage them through Google Tag Manager.

This allows you to fire one tag when your page loads instead of dozens, improving the speed and making it easier to troubleshoot problems. Adding a canonical tag to page B will accomplish this. This is where this topic seems to become a little gray. Check out this article where Google outlines the many ways you can specify the canonical page.

HubSpot has made it super easy for you to automatically add self-referencing canonical URLs for all blog posts, landing pages, and website pages , taking pretty much all of the guesswork out. Hopefully, this helps clear some things up around the topic of canonical tags.

Have you seen large SEO benefits from a dialed-in canonical tagging process? Mallory Fetchu was formerly a Marketing Consultant at SmartBug with several years of experience creating and executing a full marketing strategy for a B2B packaging company.

She is thrilled to take her knowledge of inbound marketing and help companies succeed online! Read more articles by Mallory Fetchu. Read More. Services Inbound Marketing Services.

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