Canonical - Canonical URL

 

What is a canonical URL?

The canonical URL is the address of a page defined as being the original and signaled to search engines so that they do not index other pages that have taken the content of the original. It is what is called everywhere on the Web meta canonical, canonical tag, rel canonical or even canonical tag. It is a tag inserted into the HTML code that will tell search engines that the page is canonical.

Canonical URL is the address of a page that search engines are asked to consider original

There is an almost pervasive problem on the Internet about editorial content. A text, even a page is quickly copied and republished as is or barely transformed in other websites either for advertising or by plagiarism.

This phenomenon is all the more extensive as the information concerned is interesting. However, the search engine algorithm does not like duplicate content and penalizes it by prohibiting them from accessing SERPs (search results pages). The concern then is that the original page runs the risk of being taken by robots like Google bot for one of the duplicated pages. To overcome this problem, the Google engine offers the solution to the webmaster, which is to indicate the original page as canonical as soon as it is created.

The webmaster will indicate to Google the address in the format <link rel = "canonical" href = "https://www.monsite.com/url-de-la-page.html"> and between the tags <head> and </head>. This will allow him to recognize similar pages created after the original as non-original and to consider only the holder during his page indexing operation. This selection is doubly beneficial: it does justice to the original content and avoids an overload of indexed pages in the search engine database.

Canonical URL is used to protect against content theft and is not the 301 redirect

Obviously, the ideal would be to canonize all the pages of your site. On the one hand, this is necessary when you have to create internal duplicate pages, that is to say to duplicate a page n times as in the case of a product sheet for example, in order not to have indexed by Google as the most valuable in terms of SEO.

This is also useful when the text on this page is likely to be used by other editors for the creation of their content and especially because some robots are assigned to automatically steal content in order to feed other sites. This will be the canonical page that the engine will display in the search results pages for a given query.

It should be noted that this solution has a lot of similarity with the 301 redirect which causes the engine to choose one page rather than another. The difference is that the canonical URL is for search engines only and that's for indexing while the 301 redirect returns engines and users from an old page to a new one quite simply, which is more like an update.

The usefulness of making this distinction lies in the relevance of the choice of technique to reorient users or engines.



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