How does Canonicalization help SEO?
Canonicalization is a google : Duplicate content can harm your site’s rankings.
Technical SEO includes using canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a page to index.
Canonicalization became a Google ranking factor in 2009, when Google introduced the rel=”canonical” tag as a way for website owners to indicate the preferred version of a URL with duplicate or similar content.
Implementing canonicalization with code is relatively straightforward. Here’s an example:
Let’s say that you have two versions of a webpage on your website: example.com/page1.html and example.com/page1/index.html. These two URLs contain the same content, but they are technically different URLs, which can cause issues with duplicate content and search engine indexing.
To solve this issue, you can add a rel=”canonical” tag to the header of the duplicate page (example.com/page1/index.html) to indicate that the preferred version is the non-duplicate URL (example.com/page1.html).
- Here’s what the code for the duplicate page (example.com/page1/index.html) would look like with the rel=”canonical” tag added:
<html>
<head>
<title>Example Page 1</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page1.html">
</head>
<body>
<!-- Page content goes here -->
</body>
</html>
In this code, the rel=”canonical” tag is considered best Practices.
added to the header section of the HTML code. The href attribute of the tag specifies the preferred version of the URL (https://example.com/page1.html).
By implementing canonicalization with the rel=”canonical” tag, website owners can help prevent issues with duplicate content and improve the indexing and ranking of their website’s pages in search engines
here is an example of how to implement canonicalization for the URL RH.com
<html>
<head>
<title>EXAMPLE Category Products</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://rh.com/catalog/category/products.jsp?categoryId=cat26810001">
</head>
<body>
<!-- EXAMPLE Page content goes here -->
</body>
</html>
In code above , the rel=”canonical” tag is added to the header section of the HTML code.
The href attribute of the tag specifies the preferred version of the URL
By adding this tag to the page, you are indicating to search engines that this is the preferred version of the URL and any other versions should be treated as duplicates.
Note that if you have multiple pages with similar or duplicate content, you should implement canonicalization on each page to ensure that search engines understand which pages are the preferred versions.
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[…] Canonicalization: Duplicate content can harm your site’s rankings. Technical SEO includes using canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a page to index. […]
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