What is Canonical Tag and How to use it for better SEO in 2020
Introduction to Canonical Tags
The Canonical tag is a 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. Thus, every page has a separate canonical tag.
For Example:-
http://thewebpage.org
http://thewebpage.org/index.php
The following two URLs have the same content. So, in this case, apply a canonical tag, to indicate that the URL with index.php is a Canonical URL of the first one. The canonical URL will be
<link rel=” canonical” href=”http://thewebpage.org/index.php”>
On-page SEO cannot be completed until Canonicalization is talked about. So today in this lesson we are going to talk about what is canonical tags, how to use it and its advantages in SEO. To get better organic results in SEO, you can also go through the Latest Trends in SEO – 2020 which will surely help you.
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When was the canonical tag launched?
In February 2009, the canonical link element was launched by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The purpose was to remove duplicate URLs of the website.
How to use the canonical tag?
You can use the Canonical tag by defining the link tag to the head of the HTML code of the page. This page will be canonical for search engines. For example, after placing the canonical tag in www.vkreate.in, the code will look like this which is known as canonical URL.
<link rel = "canonical" href = "http://www.vkreate.in /seo-canonical-tag" />
This designing element helps to boost your website and send the traffic to a particular canonical URL.
Why to use canonical tags and what are its benefits:
Canonical Link Element was implemented to identify the Duplicate URL on the website. Here you should not be confused with the word duplicate, as it is used for different names of the same URL.
Here is an example –
A) Example.com/
B) http://example.com/
C) https://www.example.com/
D) www.example.com/
E) www.example.com/index.html
Look at the above five URLs carefully. All the above-mentioned URLs are the same but just the different URL versions of the website example.com and when you open any of the URL then the same website will get open.
• The first issue arising for the search engine crawlers is that they get confused with all the URLs, as to which is to be indexed and which is not. This happens because all the URLs are used to open the same website.
• Secondly, due to the creation of different URL versions of the same website, the content is also gets duplicated.
Canonical tags are used to get rid of these two situations. Now what is to be done is that - put the canonical tag inside the head of the HTML page of the website.
<link rel = "canonical" href = "http://www.yourwebsite.com " />
The advantage of applying it will be that the search engine crawler will index only the page with the canonical URL and will skip the rest of the versions. In this way, duplicate URLs of the same page will end and the search engine will consider the URL containing the canonical tag as the master copy.
Keep in mind that you have to set the canonical URL as you wish. Insert the URL of your Web Pages inside the canonical URL which you want to index in the search engine.
A special question in which even big SEO’s get confused -
Do canonical tags and 301 redirects behave the same?
The answer is yes, but not to some extent. This question is quite tricky and is mostly asked in SEO interviews. So let's understand this a little bit.
• 301 Permanent redirects are used to protect the link equity of your web page (page rank, page authority, link juice, visitors).
• Canonical Tag does not fully protect link equity as it is used in the context of web crawlers rather than using site visitors or page visitors.
For example,
If Page X is redirected 301 Permanent to Page Y –
The user will move to Page Y as soon as they land on Page X. In this way, the traffic of that particular webpage will be protected rather than loss and the equity of the page will also be safe and secure.
If a Canonical Tag is placed on Page X –
The search engine crawler will know that the canonical tag is placed on Page X, so the crawler will only index it but the user can go to page Y instead of Page X so here the user is not redirected anywhere.
Apart from this, Page X equity is also not completely safe because the second version of the same page is also active and shares some amount of traffic even if it is not indexed.
How can Canonical tag help SEO of a website?
If there are many similar versions of your page or your content can be accessed from different URLs, then the canonical tag is very useful in this situation. With its help, you can make a single version a canonical URL.
After this, all the links that can be made on other versions similar to the canonical version will be counted in the links of the search engine canonical version itself. This will increase your Backlinks and improve the SEO of your website, which helps you to Grow Your Web Business. Along with SEO, you can also consider Modern Web Designing Elements To Increase The Business.
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Conclusion
Canonical tag is not a new concept. This has been used from last 9 years. It was invented by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft together. And the aim was to solve the problem of Duplicate Content.
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