What is Rel=Canonical? How to optimise this in SEO?
Canonicalization is used to assist search engines understand about the web page importance. Canonical tags are used to specify the original, master version among web pages with similar content. Well, canonical tag is an HTML code piece specifying the most important page among a bunch of other pages with similar information. Let’s discuss canonical tags, how they affect SEO and their importance for website ranking.
What Is Rel=Canonical? How To Optimise This In SEO?
To fix the issue of duplicate content one of the most reliable techniques that you can follow is using canonical tags in HTML code. These rel=canonical tags are HTML code pieces that differentiate one webpage then the rest of the page with similar information.
Putting canonical tags assists search engines in understanding that this particular web page is important and search engines have to prioritise this webpage while ranking all the pages with similar or duplicate content on the same website. It basically provides signals for search engines to understand the priority of the web page.
It is simply pinning of the master page among web pages that have similar or exactly same content. If your content is not ranked by search engines in higher levels, it is of no use.
You can only get more traffic and more user engagement if your website or web page is ranked in search engine ranking. The content that is deemed duplicate has a very bad ranking result.
To solve the issue it’s important for you to put a canonical URL because the search engines then get to know about the importance of the web page over other web pages with similar content. If your content is noticeable for users, it will end up increasing user engagement and ultimately positively influencing the site’s conversion.
Moreover when there is similar content present on several different web pages of a one single website search crawlers struggle a lot to conclude about the web page that deserves the highest rank. In this struggle, the search engines take much more time to identify which content is valuable and which one should be prioritised.
It ultimately results in wastage of your crawl budget and affects the SEO of the website badly. By setting rel=canonical tags for particular pages, you not only are helping search engines understand the priority of the web page but also managing crawl budgets much more efficiently. This also results in consolidating link equity and improving the overall user experience.
FAQs
Conclusion
Implementing canonical tags improve your website SEO and tell Google about the page that should be ranked high particularly when there are different pages with similar content. They are not only important for successful SEO of the website but also help in consolidating link equity and managing the crawl budget efficiently.