What is the Canonical label?
Canonical tags are mainly used to normalize URLs. It helps Google select the URL of the most representative page in a set of duplicate pages on a website.
When one of your pages can be accessed through multiple URLs or your different pages have similar content, then Google (search engine) will treat these pages as duplicate versions of the same page, it will choose one of the URLs as the canonical URL, and reduce the frequency of crawling the other URLs considered by the search engine as duplicate versions.
for example:
example.com?dress=1234
example.com/dresses/1234
Both URLs above open the same page. For us users there is no difference, but to search engines it is two different URLs. When the search engine can’t tell who is more important, it will divide the weight of the page equally. In order to avoid weight dispersion, we can use canonical tags to tell search engines which page address is the main one (that is, which URL I want to be included), so as to ensure the concentration of page weights and help us improve the ranking of keywords.
The code used to canonical pages looks like this：<link rel=” canonical” href=”https://example.com/blog/seo-strategy/” />
The Canonical tag is used when there are similar pages or duplicate pages. Why do similar or duplicate pages exist?
1.Generate different URLs in order to support the use of multiple device types
https://example.com/news/koala-rampage
https://m.example.com/news/koala-rampage
https://amp.example.com/news/koala-rampage
2.Dynamic URLs required to enable search parameters or session IDs, etc.
https://www.example.com/products?category=dresses&color=green
https://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD
https://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html
3.When the same blog article is placed in multiple sections at the same time, the blog system will automatically save multiple URLs
https://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/
https://blog.example.com/green-things/green-dresses-are-awesome/
4.The server is configured to serve the same content for www/non-www http/https and protocol port variants
http://example.com/green-dresses
https://example.com/green-dresses
http://www.example.com/green-dresses
http://example.com:80/green-dresses
https://example.com:443/green-dresses
Canonical Label Considerations
Canonical Label Considerations
- Note that the address in the href cannot be a dead link, an error page or a page banned by robots.
- Do not use the same or different canonicalization methods to specify different canonical URLs for the same page, otherwise search engines will consider this canonical tag invalid.
- Prefer HTTPS (instead of HTTP) URLs as canonical URLs
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