Introduction to Canonical Tags

The Canonical tag is a HTML tag or code which is used to remove duplicate content. This tells the
search engine to ignore duplicate URL and only to consider the URL which is defined in canonical
tag. Thus, every page has separate canonical tag.

For Example:-
http://thewebpage.org
http://thewebpage.org/index.php
The following two URLs have the same content. So, in this case, apply a canonical tag, to indicate
that the URL with index.php is a Canonical URL of the first one. The canonical URL will be

<link rel=” canonical” href=”http://thewebpage.org/index.php”>

On page SEO cannot be completed until Canonicalization is talked about. So today in this lesson we
are going to talk about what is canonical tags, how to use it and its advantages in SEO. To get
better organic results in SEO, you can also go through latest trends in SEO – 2020 which will surely
help you.

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company in Jaipur and is also amongst the Best IT companies in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

How to use canonical tag?

You can use the Canonical tag by defining the link tag to the head of the HTML code of the page.
This page will be canonical for search engines. For example, after placing the canonical tag in
www.vkreate.in, the code will look like this which is known as canonical URL.

<link rel = "canonical" href = "http://www.vkreate.in /seo-canonical-tag" />

This designing element helps to boost your website and send the traffic to particular canonical
URL.

Why to use canonical tags and what are its benefits:

CanonicalLink Element was implemented to identify the Duplicate URL on the website. Here you
should not be confused with the word duplicate, as it is used for different names of same URL.

Here is an example –

A) Example.com/

B) http://example.com/

C) https://www.example.com/

D)www.example.com/
Look at the above five URLs carefully.All the above mentioned URLs are same but just the different
URL versions of the website example.comand when you open any of the URL then the same website
will get open.

• The first issue arising for the search engine crawlers is that, they get confused with all the
URLs, as to which is to be indexed and which is not. This happens because all the URLs are
used to open the same website.
• Secondly, due to the creation of different URL versions of the same website, the content is
also gets duplicated.

Canonical tags are used to get rid of these two situations. Now what is to be done is that - put the
canonical tag inside head of HTML page of the website.

<link rel = "canonical" href = "http://www.yourwebsite.com" />

A special question in which even big SEO’s get confused -

Do canonical tags and 301 redirects behave the same?
The answer is yes, but not to some extent. This question is quite tricky and is mostly asked in SEO
interviews. So let's understand this a little bit.

• 301 Permanent redirects are used to protect the link equity of your web page (page rank,
page authority, link juice, visitors).

• Canonical Tag does not fully protect link equity as they are used in the context of web
crawlers rather than using site visitors or page visitors.

For example,

If Page X is redirected 301 Permanent to Page Y–

The user will move to Page Y as soon as they land on Page X. In this way, the traffic of that
particularwebpage will be protected rather than loss and the equity of the page will also be safe
and secure.

If a Canonical Tag is placed on Page X–

The search engine crawler will know that the canonical tag is placed on Page X, so crawler will only
index it but the user can go to page Y instead of Page X so here the user is not redirected
anywhere.

Apart from this, Page X equity is also not completely safe because the second version of the same
page is also active and shares some amount of traffic even if it is not indexed.
How can Canonical tag help SEO of a website?
If there are many similar versions of your page or your content can be accessed from different
URLs, then the canonical tag is very useful in this situation. With its help, you can make a single
version a canonical URL.

After this, all the links that can be made on other versions similar to the canonical version will be
counted in the links of the search engine canonical version itself. This will increase your Backlinks
and improve the SEO of your website, which helps you to Grow Your Web Business. Along with SEO,
you can also consider modern web designing elements to increase the business.

If you are also into this field of writing blogs, then you must know top 10 blogging platforms in 2020
to get best organic results for the same.

Conclusion
If you wish to get a website or an application built, then contact Vkreate or visit Vkreate which
provides best web development, mobile App development, graphic designing and digital marketing
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