In rudimentary terms, canonical tags assist in the prevention of duplicate pages. and its ranking placement on your desired search engine. Though two points of view, canonical tags affect SEO, two pages could be cannibalizing the other page for content in an attempt to gain top ranking. Though, you do not want to mix up the information on these dueling pages, simply by inserting rel=”canonical” tag, which should continue to offer users the ability to read all the information from competing pages, while allowing the search engine to take them to your desired web page. Here is our second point on how canonical tags work with SEO, you are given the authority to tell which ever search engine where to place desired pages and where they appear when being searched for. As stated earlier, this offers the very basics in canonical tags, and what they are. These tags should help eliminate duplicate pages, while also allowing for the page creator to determine where exact pages should land on a search engine.