The Canonical Tag comes under technical SEO and is an integral part of it.
Table of Contents
What is CANONICAL Tag
The Canonical Tag ( rel=canonical element) is frequently known as the “canonical link,” and An HTML tag mentions duplicate content issues by adding the “canonical URL,” the “preferred” version of a web page. We this tag just for search engines, not for users.
It greatly helps in Optimizing Web pages. Hence very important from a Search engine optimization point of view.
How to Use the Canonical Tag?
Here is the syntax For this
<link rel = “canonical” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/your-preferred-url/” />
In the syntax, we provide the URL of the primary or most selected web Page. This tag is present in the HTML header field.
Why do we use a canonical tag?
There are certain situations when search engine crawlers see different versions of your website.
The website’s URL can have the following versions.
https://webdigitalnmore.com/
( this one is with no www)
http://webdigitalnmore.com/
(with no SSL certificate)
https://webdigitalnmore.com/AMP
(Accelerated Mobile version)
The search engine crawlers do not use any algorithm to recognize which version is the original and preferred.
Canonical Tag Benefits
1) Assist in making you deal with duplicate content.
2) Crawlers can index web pages quickly.
3) It helps to boost web page ranking on Search engine results.
How to create and add a canonical tag to your website?
Here is a manageable and straightforward way to implement the Canonical tag.
The first thing is to find out if there is already a canonical tag added to your website because, in most themes, this tag is pre-added.
To know, press Ctrl + U to view the source code and find Canonical. If you don’t see any, then please follow the below steps :
- Go to Canonical Tag Generator and submit your website link, and This will generate a Rel canonical URL.
- Simply copy the entire code and paste it into the head section of your theme. We do it for coded websites.
Now, where is the head section?
- Login WordPress account
- Go to the Appearance section and go to theme editor, and then open header.PHP; there, you will the see area and Paste your code in between tags.
- The second method in WordPress is to install a plugin called insert header and footer. Now paste your code in the head section.
How to add the canonical tag in WordPress using a Yoast SEO plugin
I am using the Yoast plugin for my WordPress website, and with this plugin, there is an option to add a custom canonical URL, your primary URL. To find the canonical URL section go to in advance tab in the Yoast plugin.
Conclusion
I hope my blog is helpful and engaging, and I tried my best to explain what canonical tag is and how we can use it on our website. It helps minimize the crawl budget as well.
Please share this article with your friends whom you think will get benefited from this article.
References
https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/
