Everybody know that Google Penalize the website when it has
duplicate content. Now the question arises, what happens when you have two URLs
for the same page? It indicates Google
that there is duplicity in the content.
But now we use the canonical
URL tag to prevent this. Through this you can set an authoritative URL of your site that you want
visitors to see.
How Canonical Tag Operates
The rel=canonical tag is a way to
tell Google that one URL is equivalent to another URL, for search purposes.
Typically, a URL (B) is a duplicate of URL (abc), and the canonical tag points
to (abc). The following tag would appear on the page that generates URL (B), in
the <head></head>:
<link rel=”canonical”
href=”http://www.example.com/url-abc.html” />
The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a
301 redirect from search engine optimization perspective. In essence, you're
telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a
301 does), but not going to redirecting visitors to the new URL. There are some
differences, though:
1.
301 redirect re-points all traffic
(bots and human visitors) but the Canonical URL tag is just for search engines,
this mean you can still separately track visitors to the unique URL versions.
2.
301s carry cross-domain functionality, through this you can redirect a page
from domain1.com to domain2.com and also carry over those search engine
metrics. But Canonical URL tag is different from it, which operates exclusively
on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and sub domains).
When
and Where To Use
Many sites have encountered issues
with multiple versions of the same content on different URLs. This creates some
problems and these are:
- Search
engines don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices
- Search
engines don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority,
anchor text, link juice, etc.) to single page, or make it separated
between multiple versions
- Search
engines don't know which version(s) to rank for query results
When this
happens, site owners suffer ranking and traffic issues and search engines also
face the problem of lowered relevancy. Thus, in order to fix these problems,
webmasters has started applying the new Canonical URL tag whenever any of the
following scenarios arise.
Here, you know
the importance of using Canonical URL tag. If you find any query and want to
add some suggestion, write in the comment section.
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