Today, you will understand about the important term Canonical Tags or Canonical Url of Technical SEO. If you are reading this post then you must be a blogger and must have heard the name of your canonical tags.
That problem was duplicate Url. When Google Bots or Yahoo bots used to visit a website, they used to get multiple URLs of a post. Now it used to be the biggest problem for them which URL to index and which one should not.
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In this case, he used to index both the URLs and duplicate copies of the same content also started appearing in the search result. To solve this problem, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft invented Canonical Tags.
With the help of this, it can be found which is the parent URL and which is the duplicate and which URL should be indexed. In the next complete post, we will know about canonical tags in detail.
What Is Canonical Tag
Canonical Tags are simple Html Codes that help search engine bots to understand which is the master URL inside the website and which is the duplicate URL.
With the help of canonical tags, Google or other search engines get any post indexed on Google or other searches engines. Canonical Tags have to be written in the head section of all the pages of the website.
From the example given below, you will be able to identify the canonical tags.
Example – < link rel = “Canonical” href = “https://www.codebarta.com” />
If you want to check whether your theme has canonical tags or not, then you can check the above code by going to the head in the theme.
This code itself explains to the bots that this url is original and apart from this, whatever url it finds, has to be ignored.
Canonical Tag Definition
Canonical Tag is the tag that helps Google’s bots to tell which is the main URL of our website. Apart from this, if any other url is found then it will be ignored. Canonical Tag should always be inside the head section in the theme of the blog.
Why is Canonical Tag used?
I told you in the introduction why canonical tags were being used. But for the clarity of your concept, I will explain through an example why canonical tags are used.
You must know that by default a separate url is created for mobile and different for desktop. Suppose some of this url has been produced in one of your posts.
- https://www.codebarta.com/wordpress
- https://www.codebarta.com/wordpress/feed
- https://www.codebarta.com/page/2/
Google bot comes on top of your website, it sees 3 URLs of a post. Now, who should he index?
This is where canonical tags come in handy, whatever URL you would have entered the canonical URL. Google will get it indexed and ignore the rest.
Suppose you have not declared your canonical tags, then Google will get the post indexed according to its own and will ignore other URLs.
Advantages of Canonical Tags
There are many advantages of Canonical Tags which are as follows
- It helps to index your master URL.
- It does not allow your link juice to be distributed.
- It prevents the indexing of duplicate copies of your post.
- It helps in improving the indexing of your posts.
- It helps in maintaining the crawler budget of Google Bot.
- It helps Google Bot to identify the original URL.
- Canonical Tags help in solving the problem of duplication of your website and pages.
How to Add Canonical Tag in Blogger
- First of all, type on Google, click on Canonical Tag Generator and search.
- The website of the canonical tag generator will come in front of you. You have to open it.
- You will get a column here where you have to paste the url of your website and click on get code.
- Your code will be generated in a few seconds, you have to copy it.
- Now come to your blogger dashboard and open the theme.
- First of all, you have to check whether the canonical tag is not already available on the website.
- If not, then you have to paste it under the head and click on save.
How to Add Canonical Tags In WordPress
To add canonical tags in WordPress, you only have to install SEO Plugins. You can install Rank math or Yoast Plugin. Both these plugins automatically generate tags for your website. You will not need to do any kind of settings.
How to make a Canonical Tag
You get many tools on the Internet, through which you can generate Canonical Tags. You have to type on Google Canonical Tag Generator, many Tags Generator websites will come in front of you.
You have to open these websites and here you have to create Canonical tags by entering the URL of your website. After that, you have to put this tag in the right place in the coding of your website.
What is the relation of Canonical Tag to Google Search Console?
When you declare the Canonical Tag of your website, then that tag should be the same in Google Search Console as well.
Otherwise, Google will not be able to easily discover the URL of your website and you may face the issue of indexing.
If you want to protect your website from the issue of duplicate content, then it is very important for you to know about Canonical.
In this article, we told you What is a Canonical Tag and How to Use Canonical Tags but if you still have a problem then you can tell me comment box below. I hope that you must have liked this information, if you liked it and you think it is helpful, then do share this post on social media.