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In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Website > Pages. Click the SEO & Crawlers tab. For pages and blog posts, select a canonical URL setting. If you select Don’t add canonical URLs to any pages or blog posts, you will need to manually set canonical URLs to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.
How does a canonical tag work?
A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical”) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.
How do I select a canonical URL?
How to set the canonical URL for your website.
- In your Search Console homepage, make sure you identify the different versions of your website.
- Click the version of your site you want.
- Click the gear icon, then click Site Settings.
- In the Preferred domain section, choose the site you want to be preferred.
Where do you find the canonical tag in HTML?
Found in the section of a web page’s HTML source code, a canonical tag looks like this: These can either be self-referencing (where a canonical tag point to a page’s own URL) or can reference another page’s URL to consolidate signals.
Can a rel = canonical tag be added to a duplicate page?
Rather than risking a penalty for duplicate content, you can add a rel=canonical tag on the page which you feel is the preferred source of information, as shown in the example below. Let’s look at an example of e-commerce product page duplication below:
Why is it important to use a canonical tag?
That’s because canonicals tags are hints not directives. As long as they are respected then any signals such as links should consolidate to the canonical URL. Using canonical tag best practices also helps mitigate the risk of Google seeing an undesirable version of the page as canonical.
Which is the best way to specify a canonical URL?
Using a rel=canonical tag is the simplest and most obvious way to specify a canonical URL. Simply add the following code to the section of any duplicate page: