What are canonical urls and how do they affect your seo?
What are canonical urls and how do they affect your seo?
1 answer
@dejuan.watsica
Canonical URLs are HTML elements that indicate the preferred version of a web page. They are used when there are multiple versions of a page with similar content, in order to consolidate ranking signals and avoid duplicate content issues.
Canonical URLs have a significant impact on SEO by providing search engines with a clear signal of which version of a page should be indexed and displayed in search results. This helps in preventing search engines from indexing duplicate or similar content, which can dilute ranking signals and lead to lower search rankings.
The benefits of using canonical URLs for SEO include:
- Preventing duplicate content penalties: Search engines may penalize websites with duplicate content as it can be seen as an attempt to manipulate search rankings. By implementing canonical URLs, website owners can consolidate ranking signals to the preferred version and avoid any perceived duplicate content issues.
- Consolidating link equity: When there are multiple versions of a page, links can get distributed a**** them, diminishing the overall authority of the content. By specifying a canonical URL, all incoming links are consolidated to a single preferred version, helping to maximize the link equity and improve rankings.
- Improving crawl efficiency: Search engine bots crawl websites to understand their structure and content. When there are multiple versions of a page, it can waste crawl budget as the bots need to crawl through identical or similar content. Canonical URLs help by guiding bots to the preferred version, optimizing the crawl efficiency.
Overall, using canonical URLs correctly can help strengthen your website's SEO by consolidating ranking signals, preventing penalties for duplicate content, and improving overall crawl efficiency.