What are canonical tags?

Anubhav Sharma 115 15 Feb 2026

Anubhav Sharma

Student

The Anubhav portal was launched in March 2015 at the behest of the Hon'ble Prime Minister for retiring government officials to leave a record of their experiences while in Govt service .

1 Answers

Anubhav Sharma 15 Feb 2026

A canonical tag is an HTML element that tells search engines which version of a page is the “main” or preferred URL when multiple URLs have similar or duplicate content.

It helps prevent duplicate content issues and ensures search engines rank the correct page.

Why Are Canonical Tags Important?

Search engines like Google may find multiple URLs with the same content, for example:

https://example.com/product
https://example.com/product?ref=facebook
https://www.example.com/product

Without a canonical tag, search engines may:

Split ranking signals between versions
Choose the wrong URL to index
Reduce SEO performance
Canonical tags solve this.

How Does a Canonical Tag Look?

It is placed inside the <head> section of a page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/product" />

This tells search engines:

“This is the original and preferred version of this page.”

When to Use Canonical Tags

Duplicate product pages
URL parameters (tracking codes)
HTTP vs HTTPS versions
WWW vs non-WWW versions
Similar content across categories

Simple Definition

A canonical tag tells search engines:
“Index this version of the page, not the others.”

It improves SEO by consolidating ranking signals and avoiding duplicate content problems.

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