Canonical tag

1 - Assessments & Impacts

A canonical tag will be used to indicate search engines not to index a page at the expense of another page. This line of HTML is to use in the <head> of the page that you do not wish to see indexed. The URL mentioned will be the official page that you wish to push to search engines.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>My duplicated page</title>

</head>

<body>

This page is duplicated and prevents the original page from offering exclusive content

</body>

</html>

Benefit of using it: in order not to have several versions of urls for the same contents and to avoid duplicate content by specifying search engines that the duplicated page must be assimilated to the original page.

Initially, this recommendation is used by Google to solve the duplicate content issues related to the generation of tracking parameters duplicating your URLs. Note that this tag remains indicative for Google, by no means an obligation.

2 - Recommandations

To prevent duplicate content, by default, place a canonical tag on all your pages with a URL pointing to itself. The goal here is to prevent the potential creation of URLs incorporating unintentionally generated parameters, which would duplicate the same content.

https://www.mysite.com/my-product-page must therefore incorporate a canonical tag pointing to https://www.mysite.com/my-product-page

Duplication https://www.mysite.com/my-product-page?utm_source=fabernoveldm&utm_medium=email will be protected by the following canonical

https://www.mysite.com/my-product-page

PAGINATION PAGES = they need equal canonicals too!

Be careful if URLs have parameters that change the content of the page, it is possible to add an exception by integrating into your canonical url with this differentiating parameter. Example with pagination and its parameter differentiating the displayed content:

https://www.monsite.fr/ma-categorie?page=3 must therefore incorporate a canonical tag pointing to https://www.monsite.fr/ma-categorie?page=3

Duplication https://www.monsite.fr/ma-categorie?page=3&utm_source=fabernoveldm&utm_medium=email will be protected by the following canonicalhttps://www.monsite.fr/ma-categorie?page=3

Report abuse