Business strategies have undergone a sea change over the past few years. With that, a great online presence has become an integral part of boosting individual businesses. While creating a massive brand prominence is of paramount importance, it also requires learning the best methods to optimize business websites for search engine. That’s how the use of a rel canonical link comes into the forefront. It lets you inform the search engine giants about the similarity of certain URLs which are actually same.
With the use of canonical link, your products or contents can get ranked despite having similar product links or URLs on other websites. Using these links is justifiably beneficial because these links do not harm the ranking of your contents or products.
How using canonical links boosts your website?
The rel canonical element or canonical link happens to be the HTML element which lets website builders prevent any types of duplicate content issues. A canonical link specifies the particular canonical URL, webpage’s preferred version, and its original source. A proper use of these canonical links improves the SEO of any website.
If you have various versions of similar contents, you can pick any one of the canonical version. Upon doing so, you can point the search engine! This solves the problem concerning duplicate contents, even when search engines don’t show proper results!
Hand-Picked reasons to use canonical URLs
Mentioned below are the examples where the use of rel canonical URLs can be a savior for your website! To know further on this front, keep reading on.
- While using multiple URL versions
The rel canonical links are mostly used for the e-commerce business websites which set different URLs and hierarchies with the change in site. With the help of e-commerce website, it can have a category solely dedicated to the shoes with the listing of products. This also means that the URLs for the product pages remain the same. And it results in two URLs with same contents! Since canonical URLs happen to be e-commerce SEO’s part, with its best use, it becomes safer to direct search engines to top pages!
- When there are unintentional contents on your website
You can even have duplicate contents on the website without even being aware of it! And there comes scenarios when unintentional duplicate contents are included due to major common causes!
- Unintentional duplicate contents can be there on your website when the site has some separate versions of HTTPS and HTTP and or the WWW or non-WWW pages!
- It can also occur when another website has republished or scraped the content of your website.
- It can also happen when Meta descriptions and content titles are found similar.
- And if not the aforementioned reasons, unintentional duplicate contents can be present because of some technical faults like pagination or print problems
- While reposting existing contents
When you own a website which is a part of some national organization or franchise, you can share press releases, statements, and blog contents published originally on the national site. Rather than linking to original contents, you can instead publish contents on the site that you own. The use of a rel canonical link will direct search crawlers to its original post such that it does not seem like it is copied from somewhere.
- While syndicating blog contents
Syndicating the existing blog contents is indeed one of the best content marketing strategies for any website. Not only blog syndication expands individual brand awareness but helps reach the target audiences at a fast pace! While this is true, syndicated contents mean that the words in your content are spread all over the Internet on various pages! The canonical links let search crawlers know which contents should appear in the first and which contents are supposed to be prioritized. Blogs syndicating content already know that setting up a right canonical link is important because it doesn’t let the blogs compromise SEO or the brands’ search authority!
- A/B test pages
A/B testing happens to be marketing strategy that most of the marketers employ to check the elements on the pages and whether or not they are working appropriately. This also includes testing minuscule details like various colors of the buttons. Big changes are also included such as the page layout or something else. In certain scenarios, Google might end up crawling both the pages and get confused about the original one that is supposed to be ranked first. The rel canonical URLs serve as the roadmap to original contents.
Things to know before setting up a rel canonical link
Now that we have given you a fair idea about why using canonical link is important, here’s the best method to set up a canonical link. Since adding the canonical tag is important for your website, there are various ways by which you can perform the essentials. However, it depends on plugins that you choose and how you add codes to your site.
To perform the best method for adding a canonical tag, you’d have to follow a list of unified formats on the site. If your website has the access for multiple people, it is a possibility for them to add tags in various ways. And that’s how all the SEO problems come into the scenario. It is important for you to keep these things in mind! Rest assured are the SEO plugins that are available online by which you can set up the right rel canonical link!
After everything else
Calling the rel canonical link a powerful tool in the toolbox of SEO is nowhere an understatement. However, unlike other SEO tools, you should always use these links wisely for significant SEO improvements!