Canonical tags are also known as rel canonical and are HTML element that indicates the preferred version of a webpage. The canonical tag points the search engines to the main version of a webpage and helps the search engine index your page. This HTML code can be found in the part of the website’s HTML source code. These canonical tags can reference your own website’s pages or they can reference another website’s page. Implementing canonical tags can be extremely helpful for your website’s SEO.
Canonical Tags & SEO
Understanding and implementing canonical tags are helpful to your website’s SEO. When your website has more than one page that has similar or identical content, this can get confusing for search engines. Implementing canonical tags is important to SEO because they help your website avoid being dinged for duplicate content issues and this can impact your ranking in the search engine results negatively. Adding canonical tags is a simple yet powerful way to optimize your website’s visibility.
Some Canonical Tag Best Practices
There are some best practices to follow when implementing canonical tags. Since canonical tags are to point search engines to the preferred page that you want to be indexed and ranked, it is crucial to make sure that you have the correct version of the page you want search engines to display.
Ensure that you have the canonical tag placed in the head section of the HTML code of your website’s page. This will point to the correct URL.
Keep track of your website’s performance as well as your search engine rankings on a regular basis to be sure that the canonical tags you have implemented are working properly and are making positive impacts on your rankings.
Canonical tags are crucial to your website’s SEO! If your website has a large volume of pages that have similar or identical content it can negatively impact your website’s rank on the search engine results pages. Implementing a canonical tag to the head section of your HTML code source helps eliminate the confusion from search engines and points them in the direction of the webpage that you want to be displayed.
