Best examples of Canonicalization in SEO

What is a canonicalization

Before we learn about use of canonicalization in SEO, first we should understand what canonicalization and how it works in SEO. Today I will share few examples of canonization in SEO. It will help you to understand the method and make best use of it while working for website SEO.

Canonicalization

It is a process of informing Search Engine Crawlers about the URL length. By using canonical tag, you can actually control crawlers and make them crawl the URL according to your need. A canonical tag could tell search engines crawlers what you want them to crawl and what you don’t want them to crawl. For example: If you have a very long URL for your page because of sub directories or categories, then you can use this method to inform search engine crawlers to read URL to a certain length. let’s take an example.

Imagine you have a dynamic URL like https://www.example.com/categoy/page/product/product-category/product-name-date-and-other-factors. In case of dynamic URL’s, where the data is coming from backend, we can’t control the URL’s because it adds, extra queries in URLs. In this situation, we can take help of this method. We can use this tag and get the URL index according to our SEO Strategy. Given below is the example code for Canonicalization.

Code sample

What is the use of Canonicalization in SEO?

The best use of canonicalization is to “Deal with duplicate content”. Canonicalization is a process which informs search engine crawlers about duplicate content and let them understand the content between website pages. Dealing with duplicate content problem is not an easy task for webmasters. Whenever search engines visit your website and crawl multiple URLs with identical (or very similar) content, it can cause a number of SEO problems.

Crawlers are bots and it’s a challenge for them to understand content deeply. They might consider a lot of similar information on website as duplicate content. And because of this, crawlers might miss unique content on a website. Apart from this, if crawlers are getting duplicate content on larger scale, they might shrunk the ranking ability of your website or blog.

Also, even if your content does rank, search engines may pick the wrong URL as the “original”. But you can get rid of all these SEO problems if you are using the right canonical tags.

Why crawlers consider content as Duplicate?

It is the first question in every SEO beginner who is learning about canonicalization. Most of the time it is hard to understand for beginners that “Why crawlers consider content as duplicate content when there’s no duplicate page on website?” As I informed earlier, Crawlers are BOT they are not humans. Being a human, we can understand the page concept but for crawlers, every unique URL is a unique page which should have unique content in it.

Given below are few good examples of URL’s by which search crawlers could reach to your website or blog.

• http://www.example.com
• https://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://example.com/index.php
• https://example.com/index.php

For all humans, all of the above listed URL’s are representing one website or we can say one website homepage. But for a search crawler, every single one of these URLs is a unique “page.”

Difference between Canonical tags and 301 redirect

Often people get confused between the 301 redirect and canonicalization because of their working method. I have very simple example which can make you understand the basic difference between canonical tag and 301 redirect.

While using canonical tags, we make search crawlers to read the URL to specific limitation to help them understand between the page content where 301 redirect represents the permanent redirection where we request search crawlers to read the URL content on another location. For example in canonicalization we request crawling bots to read urls like <link rel canonical =https://example.com/category/test-page/”> for the page https://example.com/category/test-page/caonical-tags-and-its-seo-benefits

However, in 301 redirects we request crawlers to read the url content on another location i.s. https://example.com/category/real-page/canonical-tags-and-its-seo-benefits fot he page https://example.com/category/test-page/caonical-tags-and-its-seo-benefits here you can see that the category “Test-page” has been replaced with “Real-Page” which is another destination in website.

Hope this information on Canonicalization in SEO would help you to understand the benefits of canonicalization in SEO. Do comment below your feedback and suggestions for this content. I am working to provide a better place for SEO information for everyone at the same time I am learning better SEO methods. We can grow together and help each other. Do not hesitate if you have anything in your mind. Share your suggestions as I personally review all the suggestions and feedback.