Ever found yourself in a situation where you publish the same content on multiple sites?
I know what you’re probably thinking; that it is an SEO infraction and that this situation would attract a penalty from our big brother search engine.
Incidentally, having content duplicated on different sites doesn’t make Google penalize you, as many believed. It just means that Google may be confused about which site to rank for the content.
At the end of the day, none of the sites gets ranked because there’s no way of telling Google which of the sites deserved to be ranked.
So, we have this solution to help indicate the original site that should be ranked for the content. That’s what we will be addressing in this post – canonical URL.
To help you get a complex grasp of canonical URL and how you can make the most of it, the following topics serve as your guide:
- What Do You Understand By Canonical URL?
- What is the Origin of Canonical URL?
- Why in the World Should You Use Canonical URLs?
- How Google Sees Canonical URLs
- Canonical URLs vs Noindex Robots Meta Tags
- Canonical URLs vs 301 Redirects
- Guide on Using Canonical URLs for Your Site
- Conclusion
What Do You Understand By Canonical URLs?
Canonical URL refers to a web page that is preferred by the content creator or website owner for ranking by search engines. It can be found by search engines via a small piece of code on the page.
The web page may contain any content format such as texts, audio, images, or video. The main reason for indicating the canonical URL is because there is a duplicate copy of that page on a different site.
That means bloggers and content creators can syndicate their content with other sites, without any fear of being left out of search engine rankings. This is a moment of respite for those who have had to cope with this issue in the past.
I did mention that canonical URL requires you to insert a piece of code on the web page. If you’re not someone that has a penchant for fiddling with HTML codes, do not worry. There are a number of solutions that make inserting this code as painless as possible. We will address the code insertion options later on.
A canonical URL lets you duplicate your content all over the web while giving you credit as the original source, or most important web page.
What is The Origin of Canonical URL?
The canonical tag rel=”canonical”, better expressed as <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://myblog.com”/>, is a product of Google’s collaboration with Bing and Yahoo on arriving at a consensus for accepting the canonical terms.
Though the tag is mostly targeted on Google search because of its market dominance, other search engines rely on the canonical tags to identify the preferred web page.
By using the canonical code (rel=canonical tag), you are helping search engines understand the important content, resolution of issues that arise from content duplication, and in the improvement of your content’s ranking. All these have an ultimate result – improved page visibility and potential traffic to your site!
THE canonical URL has its place in your SEO toolkit and should be planned from the very first day.
Situations that call for the canonical URL may arise in the future. If you’re wondering how you came this far without using the canonical URL, let me point out some situations that will require this tag.
Why in The World Should You Use Canonical URLs?
In no particular order, these are situations that call for the use of canonical URL:
1. When you have duplicate content on different sites
This calls for the need to notify search engine crawlers on the important web page to rank for the particular content.
2. Resolution of duplication issues
Imagine Investing time, money, and effort into creating original web content, only for it to be ranked for a different site. This would be a grave injustice to you or anyone in that situation.
Many thanks to Google and the other proponents of the canonical URL! That way, any issues that may arise from duplication of content is put to rest from the very first day.
3. Improve the ranking of that content
In the past, and even at present, a lot of content creators feel that Google penalizes you for having duplicate content. Well, there is no recorded proof that Google hangs you out to dry for duplicate content.
Rather, what we observed is not getting ranked for the content. There is a limit to logical decisions that algorithms can make, and deciding which page to rank is one of them.
If Google finds the same content on multiple pages without indicating which the canonical URL is, none of them gets ranked. You might say Google is sitting on the fence in this situation, but the search engine doesn’t want to confuse itself.
To avert this situation, simply indicate the canonical URL and you have your search engine ranking. This improves your visibility for that content.
4. More traffic
After all said and done, you should get more traffic directed from the search engines.
5. Best practice for SEO
Canonical URL is one of those best practices that SEO practitioners, bloggers, webmasters, and content creators should adhere to. Knowing when to use the tag is an essential skill with many benefits to you.
6. When there is a need to repost your content
There are websites operating as part of the franchise agreement or some other organization that releases news and important updates. Rather than linking to the central sites, a canonical URL can be used to direct search engines to the original site.
That way, the search engine doesn’t view your page as “copied” from the original web page.
7. When there is a need to carry out A/B testing
A/B testing is a marketing strategy used to find out the best converting elements of a web page, landing page, or some other marketing material.
During this test, 2 different versions of a web page could be published, with little variations in elements like color, font size, etc. If you do not tell Google, the search engine would see your web pages as duplicates.
Using canonical URL serves as a roadmap telling Google which of the web pages to rank for the content.
8. When there is a need for syndicated blog content
Content syndication is a marketing strategy aimed at distributing blog posts across different publishing platforms.
It helps to create brand awareness, reach a wider audience, and boost authority in a particular niche.
When content is syndicated, it remains the same as the original. Indicating through canonical tag helps to alert search engines on which of the published posts to rank.
9. There are separate versions of the same content on your site
There are cases where you accidentally create multiple versions of the same content on your site – for instance, having https and http or www and non-www versions of the same page. The canonical URL comes in handy to indicate the preferred page.
10. Another site republished your content
Imagine creating an original masterpiece of content, only to have it scrapped by another site and republished! And the site gets ranked for the content you created.
Using canonical tags will prevent this from happening in the first place.
How Google Sees Canonical URL
Most often when the search engine is used in a generic context, the reference is to Google – the biggest of them all.
We will also be making reference to Google since it is the single largest traffic source for visitors.
An estimated 29% of all contents online are duplicates. That’s a lot for any person to handle, especially when dealing with billions of contents.
When people search online, they are looking for answers to their queries. Google responds to this by providing relevant content that addresses those queries.
Let’s say content is ranked for the keyword “talking elephant”, and this content has a duplicate on a different site. An online user searching for “talking elephant” may be provided with the web pages (we’re assuming that both duplicate pages were ranked). If the user finds the web page irrelevant to her query, chances are, the next page would be visited.
Unfortunately, the next page will be found to be irrelevant also. That’s 2 similar but irrelevant web pages in a row. It’s definitely not a good experience for the user or Google!
You might ask, what if both web pages are relevant to the search query? There will be cases of multiple copies of the same contents ranked consecutively. And also not a great user experience for anyone that uses the search engine.
So Google filters out duplicate contents if there is no indication of canonical URL. However, with canonical URL Google gets a cue on which page is more important and then ranks it.
Canonical URL vs Noindex Robots Meta Tags
Meta tag SEO and robot Meta tags offer a way of preventing search engines from crawling your page.
This is a quick fix solution, but not advisable in the long run. Google crawler is so busy that you need to allow it to go through your pages as soon as possible.
Canonical URL vs 301 Redirects
A 301 redirect may be better suited than canonical URL for certain situations. It “redirects” your visitors to a different page when an old link is clicked. The 301 redirects can be used to send traffic to archived or updated web pages.
Guide on Using Canonical URL for Your Site
Additional canonical URL to your web pages can be done in different ways. It is important to adhere to a particular method to maintain uniformity in your approach.
We will discuss some of the simple ways for you to add a canonical URL to your web pages.
1. Add Canonical URL through Yoast
Yoast SEO is an essential tool for WordPress sites and blogs. It makes the deployment of SEO very easy and time-saving, and you can use it for free.
You will first need to install and activate the Yoast plugin for your WordPress site.
From the edit page or post section, you will be able to add the canonical tag to whatever content you’ve created.
2. Add Canonical URL through Code
If you prefer an additional canonical URL without the Yoast plugin, you can opt to insert the code yourself.
All you do is place the code in the header of your HTML code, so it can be immediately accessed by the search engine crawler.
This is the code to use for canonical URL:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”yoururl.com<?php echo $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’];?>”>
Conclusion
Having duplicate contents published on different platforms might not be an everyday situation, but you just might find yourself facing such. How do you take precautions so that the preferred content gets ranked?
Using canonical URL, you can simply tell Google or other search engines the particular web page you want to be ranked.
Don’t go off a fuss because you think your content can’t be duplicated. The error might even come from you.
Situations like resolving duplication issues, an improvement in search engine ranking for the particular content, and generating more traffic, are benefits of using canonical URL. Other benefits include solving the need to repost old content and solving the issue of A/B testing for the same web content having different elements.
Duplicate contents can be confusing to Google crawlers, and as such, none of the contents gets ranked. That is Google’s way of saying “I give up on your pages”.
You can remedy this by simply inserting the canonical tag on your site. Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that makes this very easy.
Also, you can insert the code into the header section of the web page.
In all, using a canonical URL is an SEO best practice that every blogger or webmaster should employ.
If you are a Yoast SEO plugin user, and you want to ensure maximum safety and security for your website content, one of the greatest measures you can take is using the Canonical URL or simply adding the snippet code to the header section of your page.
The major crawling issues search engines can have with indexing your content is when the content is duplicated – republished elsewhere either by you or someone unknown to you.
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