What is a canonical issue?
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Search engines face confusion when a website contains many pages that share identical content causing negative effects on SEO outcomes. A canonical issue emerges when search engines face confusion because of duplicate content that stems from different URL paths.
For example, a webpage might be accessible via two URLs like:
www.example.com/pagewww.example.com/page?ref=123Both URLs show the same content, but search engines treat them as separate pages, which can dilute the ranking potential of that content. This is known as duplicate content, and it can lead to SEO problems like:
To resolve this, a canonical tag is used. A canonical tag is an HTML element that tells search engines which version of a page is the "preferred" or "original" one. It consolidates link equity and prevents duplicate content issues.