What is Canonical URL
 

Hello friends,









What is Canonical URL......?

The rel=canonical element, often called the “canonical link”, is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues

A canonical Url specifies the source URL or original content page of a given page to a search engine such as Google.

A website URL opening in www & non www format are canonical URLs.

The rel=canonical element, often called the “canonical link”, is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues.

To avoid the duplicate url canonical url must be added

From an SEO point of view here is the definition of a canonical URL: Canonical URL: the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see. Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage.

Pick one of those URLs as your canonical URL and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. A server-side 301 redirect is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page.

If there is more than one page/URL with the same content in the search result set, the canonical link URL definitions will likely be incorporated to determine the original source of the content. According to Google, the canonical link element is not considered to be a directive, but a hint that the ranking algorithm will "honor strongly.".

Choosing a proper canonical URL for every set of similar URLs improves the SEO of your site. Because the search engine knows which version is canonical, it can count all the links towards all the different versions, as links to that single version. Setting a canonical is similar to doing a 301 redirect, but without actually redirecting.