Canonical

What does canonical link do?

Seo main factors

rel=canonical

In a website it is usual that some pages have one or more duplicates, for example when we talk about the desktop and mobile version of an ecommerce's product page.

In this case, search engines need to choose one of them as the main page, known as canonical page: once they make this choice by default, they will crawl the established canonical page more often than the others.

You can also indicate to the search engines which pages you want to be shown to the users in search results.

How?

Through the manual setting of your canonical links.

What are the advantages?

You help search engines' crawling, thanks to the fact that they do not need to check every URL but they will focus on the one established as main.
Tracking one single URL is simpler.
You will enhance the ranking of the canonical page.

How the SeoChecker canonical links audit fails

If the canonical link is not valid, SeoChecker will display an error:

How can the canonical link be not valid?

there are two or more canonical links;
the canonical link refers to the site root;
the canonical link refers to a different domain;
the canonical link is not a valid URL;
the canonical link refers to a specific page for a different language or a different region.

How can I add canonical links correctly to the pages of my website?

You can do it in two ways:

To the HTTP response, add a Link header

To theof the page, add a

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    …
    <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com"/>
    …
  </head>
  <body>
    …
  </body>
</html>

Tips:

If it is feasible, do not use HTTP: go for secure HTTPS canonical URLs instead.
If you need to utilize hreflang links for diverse versions of one page (based on language or country of a user), be sure that the canonical URL refers to the right page for that specific country or language.

Related guides

Learn more about Seo main factors

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