Canonicalization is an important element that many websites owners do not value even though it impacts SEO considerably. Since much of the world’s web material contains repeated copy (duplicate content), for search engines, deciding what edition to display in SERPs is considerable difficulty. This is where canonicalization comes in.
By identifying the master version of your work, you help search engines know which site to select from and improve your page’s ranking in the process. In this post, I’m going to take you even deeper into canonicalization and explain how it meditates with your SEO strategy. So read on to learn more about canonicalization in SEO!
What Is Canonicalization?
When managing a website, canonicalization is the process by which a web page or URL is considered as the original (or canonical) version of its content. It allows us to tell search engines (such as Google) which one embody our content in an authority, and anything canonicalized to it is just one more form of that content. Hence canonicalization becomes a crucial aspect of both our site management and our content strategy.
This process is vital for avoiding the detrimental effects of duplicate content on search engine rankings. When multiple pages with potential duplicate content exist, search engines might struggle to decide which version is most relevant for a given search query. By using canonical tags, webmasters can direct search engines to consolidate ranking signals, such as links and content metrics, towards their chosen URL.
This ensures that the preferred page appears in search results, enhancing the site’s SEO performance. Canonicalization is especially important in complex websites where content might be accessible through multiple URLs due to technical reasons, such as session IDs, parameters used for tracking and sorting, or mobile and desktop versions of the site.
Implementing canonical tags correctly helps maintain a cleaner, more efficient indexing process for search engines, thereby improving a website’s visibility and user experience.
How Do You Canonicalize A Website URL?
The most direct way of canonicalizing a URL is to put a canonical tag in html code of that particular page. This tag guides the search engines to recognize a preferred version of your webpages. The canonical tag looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://mysite.com/page">
Canonical tags are versatile; they can reference URLs within the same website or across different domains. The latter, known as a “cross-domain canonical tag,” is less common but equally important for specific scenarios where content is shared across sites.
Google recommend that the URL should include the domain name. As a result, the URL should be https://mysite.com/page, not just /page.
While Google is adamant about canonical tags, it often constrains them. A case in point: if the canonical tag points to a page with significantly different content, or if the page is so slow that it cannot be readily indexed by Googlebot because of sucking up all of your CPU and memory resources which to be honest is very bad for user experience anyway. While it’s easy to achieve canonicalization from a technical standpoint, there are particularly few clear rules for who should use it and why.
We’ll consider both issues!
Why Do You Need Canonicalization?
Canonicalization is a critical practice in maximizing your site’s crawl budget and improving your search engine ranking. In the online environment, where content overlap is almost unavoidable, especially on large websites such as eCommerce, unlimited duplication may indeed threatening the way search engines gather and rank content.
With canonical tags, you may inform search engines which version of your content you believe is best, allowing them to crawl content more effectively. As a result, your crawl budget is spent on single pages of a value rather than several copies, nor are they placed in indexation to update and crawl for new content. In addition, canonical correlation places all duplicate pages’ relevancy under one URL.
By having applied canonical tags, your website and your preferred page is indeed protected from losing the link value that matters most and instead derives full-ranking potential from your preferred page.
Therefore, more than just providing for more efficient crawl budget management, canonicalization serves to improve your preferred page’s visibility and ranking by combining all of the SEO efforts that you gain from the external links you might have acquired.
Thus, canonicalization is an important part of SEO tools that you simply need in order to stay competitive in search engine result page rankings.
When Do You Need Canonicalization?
Canonicalization is necessary in a variety of situations to optimize SEO performance; including:
1. Republishing Content Across Sites:
When you are republishing the exact content on different sites across the internet, canonicalization is a more significant process to safeguard your website’s SEO integrity. In this case, think of the osteopath publishing an article with comprehensive information and decides to repost it to another new location of their clinic.
Choosing the original version and applying the cross-domain canonical tag is ideal. Since the osteopath may want search engines to recognize the article as the original, they should select the main version. By doing this, search engines can concentrate ranking signals to the chosen URL instead of sharing it among multiple versions of the same article.
Consequently, the canonical version increases traffic and positions in search engine results as the duplicate does not distract it from the search engine. While the content received from another internet source should be unique for the consumer, this parameter is often unattainable; canonicalization ensures that the proper information is available to the user without compromising SEO characteristics.
2. Content Syndication:
Content syndication helps increase content reach via third-party websites. Syndication often utilizes RSS feeds, and due to the simplicity of distribution, content can be widely distributed to increase the audience. Concurrently, the syndicated version can outrank original content in the SERPs, causing loss of SEO value.
However, content owners often request syndication and apply a canonical tag to the post, designating the original blog post as the canonical version. This is an essential move because it helps search engines direct authority signals and ranking power rightfully to the source. Even more critical is that Google News ensures original versions appear higher when syndicated upon the correct canonical settings.
3. URL Variants:
Though you may have already noted it, some web addresses contain “www” while others do not. Similarly, while some of them end in a slash “/” and others do not, some will be secure, beginning in “https” and others will not, beginning in “http”. In the unfortunate instance of those three variables; that is, whether or not they exist, if a website has those characteristics, the possibility of each URL will be eight:
- https://www.mysite.com
- https://www.mysite.com/
- https://mysite.com
- https://mysite.com/
- http://www.mysite.com
- http://www.mysite.com/
- http://mysite.com
- http://mysite.com/
Such seven versions of the same URL would divert to the user to the eighth. Nonetheless, if those redirects were not in place, some canonical tags might well help alleviate the difficulties that many URL variations produce.
4. Parameterized URLs:
The URL parameter rationale is most critical for sites that rely on parameterized URLs, which are common in several scenarios – marketing campaigns, search filters, keyword queries on content websites, among others.
The problem with parameterized URLs is that as much as they enable tracking and customization in terms of user experience, they create multiple URLs for the same content piece. Consequently, search engines may fail to understand the primary version, or worse, index the wrong URLs.
Therefore, to ensure that all versions lead back to the main URL, a canonical tag should be inserted in all the enforcing URLs. Moreover, the primary content should contain a self-referencing canonical tag as a master version affirmation. This approach is critical for clarity and maintaining high search engine rankings.