Canonical tag

What is a Canonical Tag?

A Canonical tag specifies the sourceURL (or the original content page) of a particular page for a Search Engine like Google. Canonical tags are used to declare a single page as its own source or to duplicate pages to point to their source/origin page. Search engines use the canonical tag to combat duplicate content issues and assign the page that is declared as "sourceURL" is referred to as a search engineRanking-value for this content.

Why are canonical tags important?

Duplicate content is a big no-go for search engines. Pages with identical or very similar content on your website are considered negative. This can be used by Google to devalue your website when determining rankings. If you use https on your website, a Content-management system such as WordPress or Drupal or run an eCommerce website, you have the option of combining different URLs.

Diese können von Menschen verwenden werden, um auf Ihre Website zuzugreifen. Durch die richtige Verwendung von Canonical Tags für Seiten auf Ihrer Website können Sie diese Fallstricke vermeiden und die Vorteile einer robusten Website und rationalisierter Praktiken zur Suchmaschinenoptimierung voll ausschöpfen.

How do I apply a Canonical Tag?

On the pages that Google considers to be Canonical tag should recognize, appends a link tag to the head of the HTML code. For example, to link www.wolf-of-seo.de with the Canonical tag the code would look like this:

<link rel=“canonical“ href=“https://wolf-of-seo.de/“ />

Repeat this step for every page on your website that you want to make "canonical". Here, too, the use of a Content Management Systems like WordPress optimize this effort.

On which pages should I apply the Canonical Tag?

As many as needed. Social media visits, internal site searches, referral links, and other inbound referrals all have the potential to create a unique URL that could have a negative impact on your website's rankings. In addition, many allow Content-Management systems several URL-paths provide access to the same content. All of these paths can be searched, and Google could potentially identify them as separate pages with duplicate content.

If you're not sure if duplicate content issues are affecting your SEO, we can perform a full SEO audit of your site to identify issues that are affecting how your site is searched and where it ranks. Once you know what the issues are, you can start fixing them.