What is Canonical URL?
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A Canonical URL is the version of a webpage that you would want search engines to use in place of other URLs having similar content to that of the preferred URL. It minimizes problems of duplicated content, and directs the search engine on which URL to index.
For example, a website may have the same content accessible through different URLs, such as:
https://example.com/pagehttps://www.example.com/pagehttps://example.com/page?ref=123By specifying a canonical URL, such as
https://example.com/page, you tell search engines that this is the main version to index. This is done by adding a<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page">tag in the HTML of the webpage.Why is it important?
Avoid Duplicate Content Issues: Prevents a site from having different pages compete for a high ranking for the same keyword.
Improve SEO Ranking: It centralizes all the ranking signals to the canonical version.
Better Crawl Efficiency: Helps search engines to pay attention to the preferred URL thus saving crawl budget.
Canonical URLs serve to eliminate confusion in terms of search engine optimization or SEO in relation to a website.