Unleash the Power of Canonical Tags

August 14, 2023

Canonical tags are crucial in optimising your website's search visibility and overall performance.

If you’ve been in the back end of a website or own one of your own, you’ll likely come across the term canonical tags. While they can be confusing, we’re here to clear things up for you.

How can Canonical Tags Help My Website?

Please don’t underestimate the significance of canonical tags for your website’s success, as they are crucial in optimising your website’s search visibility and overall performance. The key takeaway is simple: all pages on your website should have canonical tags.

A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML code that helps search engines understand which is the preferred version of a web page and is invaluable when multiple versions with similar content exist on a site.

By implementing canonicals, you can prevent issues related to duplicate content and ensure that search engines correctly attribute the relevance and authority of your pages.

Using Canonicals

Even if you don’t have instances of duplicate or similar content, making your canonical tags self-referential for the pages they belong to is crucial.

This means that if a page is the preferred or canonical version of itself, the canonical tag should point back to the page’s own URL. By doing so, you clearly indicate to search engines that this particular version is the primary one for a given topic or keyword.

For example, for the blog post you are currently reading, we would want this article to include a self-referencing canonical, so the canonical would be:

				
					<link rel="canonical" href="https://techseoaudits.com/unleash-power-of-canonical-tags/" />

Canonical Recommendations

By default, for our clients and when conducting an SEO audit, we recommend that your pages should have self-referential canonical tags. This provides a solid foundation for your website, and you can and should update or override them as needed further down the line.

This flexibility allows you to adapt to changes, refine your SEO strategy, and address any specific scenarios that may arise, and you have a solid foundation to build upon.

Implementing canonical tags across all your pages is fundamental in maximising your website’s potential. It ensures better search engine rankings, improves the user experience, and can encourage more organic traffic to your main money pages.

Nikki Halliwell

Based in Manchester, UK, Nikki is a freelance Technical SEO Consultant. She has worked at several agencies and in-house and has worked across the health, hospitality and fashion industries and more. Nikki enjoys working with eCommerce websites and beyond to ensure that websites are easy to find, load quickly and work efficiently.