Reading Time: 3 minutesWhat is the Canonical Tag and What does it do?
For any page on your website, the canonical tag sets the preferred URL. This is useful for situations where your content management system uses various URLs for the same page or you have pagination for multiple pages of the same article or topic. The search engines really dislike duplicate content. This tag can assist with letting the engines know that the content appearing on multiple URLs is the same and directing their indexing appropriately.
Using the canonical tag tells the search engines to consolidate indexing of duplicate content to a single URL. We’re also informing the search engine which URL is the one to use for calculating rank.
How to Implement the Canonical Tag
Implementing the canonical tag is no harder than applying a meta tag. In many cases, it may be more difficult to determine where duplicate web pages on your site exist and which page you really want indexed and which URLs you want the search engines to ignore. If you’re having trouble with this, feel free to contact us and we can certainly point you in the right direction. You may also want to look back at our fix duplicate content blog post as a reference, as well.
Matt Cutts explains the canonical tag like this:
The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://exmaple.com/page.html”/>
That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265.
Also, take a look at the Google help topic on the canonical tag.
The bottom line is that the canonical tag is helpful. But, keep in mind that I highly recommend that you do everything possible to remove the duplicate content on your web site before you resort to using the canonical tag.
Practical Uses of the Canonical Tag
How to Use the Canonical Tag in Pagination
Make sure each page in the pagination set has a self-referencing canonical tag. A common mistake is to have a canonical tags pointing back to the first page in the set. This is incorrect because as someone pages through your content each page brings back the next set of items, so they’re not duplicate.
If you have filters or sorting options that generate additional URL parameters, then you can use a canonical tag on those versions to point back to the non-filtered and non-sorted version of the page. For example:
Example Page 3 in a pagination set:
https://example.com/category?page=3
The (self-referencing) canonical tag would be: https://example.com/category?page=3
Example Page 3 sorted by price high to low:
https://example.com/category?page=3&sortby=3
The canonical tag would be: https://example.com/category?page=3
This helps prevent search engines from indexing every sort variation of every paginated page.
Using the Canonical Tag for Paid Media Landing Pages
If you’re driving paid media traffic to your site and not a dedicated set of excluded landing pages you will need the canonical tag to tell search engines not to index all the campaign variations. The paid media campaigns will often use tracking parameters, such as:
utm_campaign
utm_medium
utm_source
utm_term
utm_content
The media teams can generate multiple campaigns published on a variety of sources and will use these to track their performance. This can create several variations for example:
https://example.com/seo-services?utm_campaign=brand&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc
https://example.com/seo-services?utm_campaign=brand&utm_source=google&utm_medium=display
https://example.com/seo-services?utm_campaign=brand&utm_source=myemailsource&utm_medium=email
https://example.com/seo-services?utm_campaign=brand&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=advertising
In this case the /seo-services page needs a self-referencing canonical tag to avoid having all of these paid media variations from showing in the search results.
Tracking Activity from Google Business Profiles
If you chain of 10 locations with separate location pages for each one, you may want to ensure that each website URL in the Google Business Profile is set to link to that location’s specific location page. Then you can use utm tracking parameters to help you track activity from each location. This is another good case for using the canonical tag on the location page to prevent the utm variants from appearing in the search results.
Customer Service emails or Customer Surveys
As part of your customer service function you will be sending emails to your customers and clients. We always recommend the email contains some links back to the important pages on your site, perhaps subtly in the footer for example. In these cases you may want to also use utm tracking parameters to track the effectiveness of these emails. Remember that if someone opens their email in a mail client, instead of a web based system like Gmail or Yahoo mail, there won’t be any referrer information, so Google Analytics will group that traffic into the Direct channel. You can use utm tracking parameters to help you report on activity from these emails. While Google may not be able to read emails and discover these URLs, they can often be publicly shared and discovered that way. So using canonical tags on those pages will help avoid those tracked URLs from appearing in search results.
At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our SEO Audits, Local Listing Management, Website Redesign Consulting, and B2B digital marketing services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.
