Canonical SEO: What is this tag and how to use it in your strategies

Currently, it is almost impossible to think about the success of a web page without applying SEO techniques that take care of its positioning and update itself to the standards that Google is changing more and more frequently. Among these techniques and tools, a tag is still more than necessary: ​​the canonical SEO .

If you’ve been in the world of organic positioning for a while, chances are this label sounds familiar to you. If you have just started, do not worry, because in this article I will explain from the beginning what is the canonical SEO and go into more detail on its use and its utilities.

Do you have everything ready to delve into one of the most important labels within organic positioning? Well let’s get started!

What is Canonical SEO: Starting with Definition

We are talking about a tag, also known as a canonical link, that describes a main page so that it is perceived in this way facing Google and that can point to other similar pages without causing a problem of duplicity and cannibalization .

Therefore, the canonical SEO helps us to have several similar pages and URLs without Google understanding it as similar content , avoiding penalties for our SEO positioning .

In this way, if we have a web page on marketing and we want to cover all the areas that this sector can cover , it would be convenient to indicate with a canonical SEO which is our main page, so that Google does not interpret the rest as duplicate content.

It is also especially useful if we have an ecommerce , where it is possible that we have a main article and it has variants in different colors. It is still the same product, but we must create different URLs for its colors. Therefore, the canonical SEO will come as pearls to indicate to Google that we have a main product and that this can present variations without it being the exact same content .

But how can we apply one of these canonical labels? In the next point I explain it to you with an example.

How to use canonical SEO

Applying a canonical tag to our website is very simple and will save us from many headaches in the face of the progression of our SEO positioning.

Below I leave an example with our own website , where we indicate that the home is the main page and that within it there may be similar content that Google must understand as related:

<link rel = ”canonical” href = https: //thallalokesh.com />

In this way, we are pointing out what our main URL is. It is recommended to include it in the rest of similar pages. Thus, if we have another page that was thallalokesh.com/marketing-digital, we are talking about something very similar to what our home contains, but without duplication of content, since Google already has the information in the canonical SEO that our The main page points to others like this that deal with similar topics.

The same would happen if what we are trying to imply is that we have a product that has color variants. The example, assuming we sold that product on the thallalokesh website would be the same:

<link rel = ”canonical” href = https: //thallalokesh.com/produco />

In the rest of the colors of said product, we would add this canonical SEO tag so that Google understands that it is not a duplicate content, but a variant.

In this way, we would already have our canonical label and we would have an essential way to enhance our organic positioning without being harmed by possible interpretations of duplicity or cannibalization.

Does canonical SEO have anything to do with 301 redirect?

This is a frequent question that we must clarify. A 301 redirect is not the same as a canonical link. And it is that in the 301 redirect what we do is send directly to the new URL to everyone who puts an old URL.

For example, if we have a page that talks about how to apply SEO techniques and our previous URL was thallalokesh.com/como-aplicar-tecnicas-SEO but we have optimized it to thallalokesh.com/técnicas-seo, the 301 redirect will take every user to enter the first directly into the second. And so we avoid the famous error 301 that does not show any content.

In the case of canonical SEO, it is not a redirect, it is a reference. On the page in question we indicate that said URL is framed within a larger theme that has our main website as the reference to follow. Both URLs exist, they contain something similar but the search engine understands that it is not a duplicate page.

Indications and advantages of canonical SEO

Once we have understood much better what this label consists of, we will go on to see a series of indications when it comes to applying it . We will also describe the main advantages, since it contributes a lot towards a quality SEO strategy.

Indications for applying a canonical label

• It must always appear in the Head of the web . If we incorporate it in the Body of our page, it will not take effect.
• Never point to 404 pages with a canonical. This will only create further contradiction for Google, as we are targeting a page that cannot be accessed.
• The canonical SEO is not used together with a noindex attribute , since it is another way to confuse Google and harm our positioning.
• Do not use canonical for numbered pages , as these are different and are understood as such.
• Always use the full address , not just the stretch of URL that we want to reference (the case of http://thallalokesh.com/marketing-digital and not only the final part).

Advantages of using canonical SEO tag

Throughout the text we have already discussed some of the advantages of using this type of label , which we can summarize as follows:

• Avoid duplication and cannibalization problems misunderstood by search engines, which helps us in our positioning strategy.
• It is easily added to the code and does not require experts to apply it.
• If you have an ecommerce, it will allow you to reference products with slight variations (such as color) without your pages being cannibalized.
• This tag is understandable not only by Google, but also by other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo.