A canonical link (rel = canonical element) helps to define a "preferred" page version if certain pages were duplicated. In this case search engines will only crawl and index the specified page version.
This tag is also useful if you have a single page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content. In this case, Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often. You can find more information about how a canonical link consolidates duplicate URLs in the guide in Google Help Center.
Adding a canonical link
To set up a canonical link, open the site's editor and navigate to the pages menu in the toolbar:
Open the settings of the page you'd like to define as a "preferred" one by clicking on the "gear", proceed to the SEO tab and enter the canonical link for this page in the field:
Hit Done and publish your site for changes to appear live.
Important: the changes may not be reflected in the search engines immediately. It may take up to 3-14 days for them to crawl the site and add it to their index. To speed up the process, add the site to the Google Search Console and request indexing.
This tag is also useful if you have a single page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content. In this case, Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often. You can find more information about how a canonical link consolidates duplicate URLs in the guide in Google Help Center.
Adding a canonical link
To set up a canonical link, open the site's editor and navigate to the pages menu in the toolbar:
Open the settings of the page you'd like to define as a "preferred" one by clicking on the "gear", proceed to the SEO tab and enter the canonical link for this page in the field:
Hit Done and publish your site for changes to appear live.
Important: the changes may not be reflected in the search engines immediately. It may take up to 3-14 days for them to crawl the site and add it to their index. To speed up the process, add the site to the Google Search Console and request indexing.
Published on: 01 / 22 / 2020