If you own an e-commerce website or have a website that operates in multiple countries, you probably face the need to use canonical links.
What are canonical links?
Canonical links are a content optimization technique that could help you improve your SEO.
What is content duplication, and why is it relevant?
If your website fits the description above, you likely have duplicated content across your platform. For example, an item of clothing that offers multiple colours uses the same web pages to display the item, each with a slight variation.
Unfortunately, search engine robots rank websites based on criteria such as unique content and relevance. Google loves new and different content, which could be a key element to improving search engine optimization. However, as per the previous example, content duplication could be unavoidable.
How to counter the negative effects of necessary content duplication?
This is where canonical links come into play. The solution to having content duplication without this drawback is to declare to search engine robots that your website needs to duplicate its content. You can do this by using canonical links. Adding canonical links to an HTML text allows you to reference a page and compile duplicate links into that one indexed page. This will indicate that all other pages have similar content. This way, when search engines crawl the page, there is no duplicated content, and the canonical links specify under which page the similar content should be listed.
Hopefully, this article will help improve your SEO strategy through canonical links.
Thanks for reading!
Sources
Tse, T. (2021, September 29). Canonical URLs: What are they and why are they important? Shopify. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://www.shopify.ca/partners/blog/canonical-urls
Image: Kindness, J. (2021, December 28). How to use the REL=canonical tag properly. AgencyAnalytics. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://agencyanalytics.com/blog/a-guide-to-proper-use-of-the-relcanonical-tag
