Canonical URL
What do you know about Canonical URL? Best Practice Guide
For every possible website, SEO seems to be pretty important. The same rule is applicable when it comes to the online store as well. The canonical URLs are noted to play a major role to ensure that the client’s website is not penalized by the search engines and that SEO remains strong.
The chosen Canonical URL is known to keep confusion at bay for the search engines when various URLs point to the same webpage or content. It can further help in informing which of the URLs have highly similar or identical content.
Whether you know what canonical URL is or haven’t heard about this term before, this article is here to talk about the points in detail. It will help your online store to be right up towards the successful section over here.
Understand more about canonical URLs:
A canonical URL is mainly targeted to be an HTML link element. It has the attribute of rel= “canonical”, as presented in thesection of the website of your client. It will specify to all those search engines, which are the preferred URL.
- So, the canonical URL element will inform Google along with other search engines to just crawl a website and the right URL to index that specified page’s content within it.
- It is mostly because URLs are known to have some variations, depending on so many factors. However, they might end up serving the same content.
- This current specification first came live in 2012 April and was noted to be the RFC 65596.
- Whenever you have a web page accessible by various URLs or multiple pages with the same content, it is mandatory to specify to the search engine that the URL is authoritative for that chosen page.
The importance of canonical URLs these days:
There are so many reasons out there behind the growing popularity of canonical URLs these days. Understanding those points beforehand will be a great shot to consider right now. So, the points listed below will help you big time with that guidance.
It helps to specify which URL you want the chosen potential people to see in search results:
As you own the store, you have the complete right to which URL you want your potential customers to see or use to reach out to your page. With the help of a canonical URL, you can make that choice happen and keep everything “clean.”
- They help in consolidating link signals for duplicate or same pages and then manage syndicated content:
- With the help of canonical URLs, search engines have the power to consolidate information that they have for the individual URLs and then get them into authoritative and single URLs.
- In case you are trying to syndicate content for publications on the other domains, the canonical URLs will help in consolidating page ranking to a certain preferred URL.
- So, in order words, duplicate content across websites will not have to compete for that ranking or traffic in the search engines.
They will simplify the tracking metrics for a single topic or product:
Even though there are various URLs available, it can become more difficult in order to get consolidated metrics for that specified content piece. Canonical URLs will keep all the things organized and simple, mainly when it comes to reporting the performance to clients.
The SEO considerations to follow for canonical URL:
There are different ways in which you get to canonicalize various URLs out there. Focusing on these canonical URLs will fall under the category of on-page SEO and not off-page SEO. Other than using rel= “canonical” you have various ways to help canonicalize the URLs. Even though the above-mentioned point is the most recommended way to consolidate duplicate content for the search engines, there are other ways you can follow.
- Using passive parameters in the Google search console:
In the Google Search Console, you can set URL parameters when the website gets verified. It provides you with the power to tell Google the right parameters that you want to consider as passive. You get to tell Google that when it sees such a URL parameter, it can treat the same like it doesn’t exist.
- The power of 301 redirect:
A 301 redirect is targeted to be a status code that will let search engines know that you wish to create a permanent redirect from one URL to another. It will send the visitors and also the search engines to another URL than what they have originally requested. These redirects are also designed to be linked in multiple URLs together so that the search engines get to rank all addresses, depending on domain authority from the chosen inbound links.
So many other ways:
Apart from the points mentioned above, some of the other ways in which you get to canonicalize various URLs are using the power of location hashes, and more.
Furthermore, while dealing with SEO and canonical URL, it is always important to understand all the possible implications it has with the chosen search ranking over here. It can either get good or bad.
