Canonicalization For Seo - When Should You Use Them?

What is a canonical URL?

A canonical URL is the URL of the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages.
For example, according to search engines, if you have two URLs for the same webpage, such as
https: world wrestling federation.com and world wrestling federation.com and if we give as word 'canonical' in any one of them, that one will be chosen as canonical URL.

What are the uses of canonical URLs?

Canonical tags are used in SEO to help search engines index the correct URL for a webpage and avoid duplicate URLs. A canonical tag is also known as a canonical link or "rel canonical", is a tag in the source code of the page that indicates to search engines that a master copy of the page exists.

Canonical link HTTP header Using rel=canonical on not so same or similar pages Using rel=canonical in combination with a hreflang rel=canonical is a power tool

How to set canonical URLs?

To set canonical URLs for a page, first, you assume two versions of the same page, each with exactly the same content. The only difference is that they are in separate sections of your site. And because of that, the background color and the active menu item are so different, both versions have been linked from other sites, so the content itself is clearly valuable. So which version should search engines show in results?

For example, these could be their URLs:

workstation.com/wordpress/seo-plugin advertisementdirectory.com/wordpress/plugin..

When should you use a canonical URL?

301 redirect or canonical:

If you have no knowledge and ideas whether to do a 301 redirect or set a canonical, what should you do?

The user can do a process of always redirecting unless there are technical reasons not to. If you cannot do redirects that would harm the user experience or be otherwise problematic, set a canonical URL. The alternative way to redirect the manager in Yoast SEO Premium helps you set up redirects.

Should a page have a self-referencing canonical URL:

The non-canonical page to the canonical version is linked, but the condition is a page should set a rel=canonical for itself, this is a much-debated topic amongst SEO. At Yoast, having a canonical link element on every page, and Google has confirmed that's best. So, all of these URLs would show the same content.

example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?isnt=awes.. example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?cmpgn=twi.. example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?cmpgn=fac..

Cross-domain canonical URLs:

Cross-domain canonical URLs happen when you have the same piece of content on several domains. Some sites or blogs republish articles from other websites independently, as they feel the content is good, matchable, and relevant for their users.

But if you had read the coding from HTML of every one of those articles, you would find a rel=canonical link pointing back to our original article. So all the links pointing to their version of the article count towards the ranking of our canonical version.

They try to understand and take our content to bring their audience, and we get a clear benefit from it.