Canonical Tag are very important in On Page SEO (search engine optimization). On Page SEO is not complete until we discussed of canonical tags.

So today I will give you all the information about the canonical tags because many people do not know what the canonical tag is and what its advantages are, and how to use it.

If you want to know about the Canonical tags, so read this article completely, you will understand everything easily.

What is Canonical Tag ?

Basically a Canonical tag is just an HTML code and is nothing.

This defines the main version for duplicate and similar pages.

In simple words, if you have the same or similar content available under different URLs, you can use the canonical tags to specify which version is the main and the original

And thus you can index whatever URL you want to index on Google.

When was the Canonical tags introduced?

In February 2009, the canonical link element was introduced by Google, Bing and Yahoo. The purpose was to remove duplicate URLs on the website.

Why Canonical Tag important for SEO ?

Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Too much duplicate content can also affect your “crawl budget” And also your website ranking.

This means that Google can waste time crawling multiple versions of the same page instead of searching for other important content on your website.

Choosing a proper canonical URL for every set of similar URLs improves the SEO of your site.

This is because the search engine knows which version is canonical, and can count all the links pointing at the different versions as links to the canonical version.

Canonical tags solve these problem, canonical tags define Google which URL is duplicate and which original and which URL to crawl.

How do we Use Canonical Tags ?

On pages you want Google to recognize as canonical, add a link tag to the head of the HTML code.

For example,any website have many URLs like:

https://example.com

https://www.example.com

http://example.com

http://www.example.com

All these URLs are opening the same website, one of them is the main one and all the rest are duplicates.

If we don’t place the canonical tags in one of these URLs, the Google bot will get confused which URL to crawl.

So that’s why any URL that we want to show the main URL, in the header of that URL, we put that URL in the canonical tag we want to make the main URL.

How to add Canonical tag in WordPress and HTML ?

For example we want this URL (https://example.com) to be our main URL and Google bot crawls it and index it, so we have to write this URL in header of html like this:

<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://example.com” />

Canonical Tag shown in red box for our website home page.

And if you use the Yoast SEO plugin, you can set the canonical tags very easily in every page.

The Canonical Tag is shown in the red box for our website home page it’s inside in the yoast SEO plugin.

You can check your website performance 

Advantage of Canonical Tags

The advantage of applying canonical tag will be that the search engine crawler will index only the page with the canonical URL and will skip the rest of the version.

This way the duplicate URLs of our same page will end and the search engine will consider the URL containing our canonical tag as an original copy.

Keep in mind that you have to set the URL at will. The URL you want to index in search engines, put the same URL in the canonical tag.

And Pages with canonical tags crawl more quickly compare than without canonical tags pages.