Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello, welcome back to another episode of SEO that Hard.

Speaker 1: 1:18

And it's me here, ed Dawson, hosting as usual, and today I'm going to talk about canonicalization, which is actually quite a hard word to say. Without getting it mixed up, it'll be a term that you will come across and it might be one that you might have thought. What does it mean? So, first things. Then let's answer the fundamental question what is canonicalization? Well, in the context of SEO, canonicalization is the process of selecting the best URL, where there's several choices available for a single piece of content. So, essentially, it's telling search engines which version of URL you want to appear in search results. Now, why is this important? Well, it's because search engines, they want to provide the best user experience, they want to deliver unique, relevant content, all that kind of stuff. And when the same content is accessible through multiple URLs, it can confuse the search engines. So it can lead to issues like duplicate content, where search engines may see these URLs as separate pages with identical content, which can delete your page authority and it can impact your rankings. It wastes crawl budget because search engines will only allocate a certain amount of crawl budget to your site, so how many pages they'll crawl on your site over a certain period of time? And if they're crawling duplicate pages, then you're essentially using some of this budget unnecessarily, which means you get less crawl budget available for other pages to use and it gives incorrect page ranking. So the search engines they might rank a URL that you don't want them to over the one you actually want people to see. So by properly implementing canonicalization, you help the search engine understand which version of your page is the master copy, ensuring that your content gets indexed and ranked appropriately. So let's think about why it matters for seo.

Speaker 1: 3:01

So you think about if you've got an e-commerce site with product pages that can be accessed through different urls. Do things like filters, sorting options or session ids. You'll have seen these. So it's where you might have, um, you know, a product page for, say, shoes. Your best url that you want is wwwexamplecom slash products slash shoes. That's the version that you want to be indexed. But the same content might also be available on wwwexamplecom slash products. Question mark category equals shoes. Ampersand sort equals price or even on under wwwexamplecom slash products. Question mark category equals shoes.

Speaker 1: 3:43

So you can I know it's hard to speak these things out compared to seeing them online, but you'll know what I mean where, basically, you can get exactly the same content through a number of different URLs and these URLs are probably playing similar or very almost identical content and without canonicalization, the search engine might treat each URL as a separate page, which this will lead to split link equity. So the backlinks pointing to different versions of the page dilute the overall link equity. So you've got three pages, say, with a link each means each page and you've got one link when really you'd link each, which means each page has only got one link when really you'd be able to have one page with all three links on it, which can lead to lower rankings. So duplicate content can cause search engines to rank each page lower or even exclude them from the search results of being duplicates, and it can confuse the search results to users who might see multiple versions of the same page. So if you specify a canonical URL, what you're doing is you're consolidating all the signals, link, equity, preferred version into that one url that you want to be the one the search engine is to take to take notice of, and it improves your chances of ranking higher. So obviously you're probably thinking how do, how do you implement canonicalization effectively? So the way to do it is to use the link rel equals canonical tag.

Speaker 1: 5:03

Now, don't try and remember all the sort of any html. I'll tell you now this is you just need to go and research this research. What the canonical tag is and what this is is a bit of html code that goes in the head section of your website and it essentially says you know, this is the link, this is the canonical link for this page. So if you essentially get this page, if the crawler gets this page from any url the one that you're telling it in this canonical tag that you're saying to it, this doesn't matter what URL you got this page from. The canonical, original master version of this page that I want you to consolidate all your signals to is this one that I'm giving you here and that's the one that you put in there like the href link to the actual canonical version. So, again, really hard to explain on a podcast. Go and google it.

Speaker 1: 6:04

Go and go and research on how to create a canonical link element in the head of your html code that even on a page that you think has no canonicals, it's best practice to have a self-referencing canonical tag. So that's basically. You know, even if the page is unique, has no duplicates, make sure you still include a canonical tag on that page that points to its own URL to help prevent any accidental duplicate content issues in the future. Because just because you've only got one version of that page, now that Google's found it might find there might be other ways into that page content that Google might find that may create a duplicate version. So you want to have that self-referenced Chronicle tag on every page.

Speaker 1: 6:43

You want to be consistent with your URLs. So, for example, always make sure you include the HTTP versus the HTTPS version and like the www versus the non-www version. So whichever version way you decide to do it. So, for example, if you have all your urls don't have the www on, make sure you stick with this across your site. If they all have the www on. Make sure you are consistent with that across the site. So just be consistent with how you treat urls.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Now you can canonicalize against across domains if necessary. So say, you syndicate any content to other websites. Where you've got similar content on multiple domains, you can use cross-domain canonical tags to point back to the original source. So it works. If you're sharing that content out or you've got multiple URLs, domains, you can point them all back to the one version that you want Google to consider the canonical version. You want to if you can avoid canonicalizing to redirected URLs. So if you've got a page which is the canonical version of a piece of content and you then 301 that page to another page, it's really important to, if possible, to change all the canonical versions to point to the new URL and not to the 301 URL. And also, you want to keep your canonical urls clean. So in that version, when I gave the, the different examples, there was one which was a very simple, you know, examplecom slash products, slash shoes. That's a nice, clean version.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Don't use your chronicalizer version as being the one with all the you know parameters on, because it's better to keep it on the clean, clean url if you can. Yeah, and you need to use absolute url. So an absolute url means you need to include the http or https slash, the full domain. Don't you do chronicles to relative urls where you're just including, like this, from the first folder onwards, only have one canonical tag per page. If you include multiple canonical tags, I mean A, that's probably confusing yourself. It's also going to confuse the search engines. Always stick to one clear canonical tag per page.

Speaker 1: 8:53

Make sure you monitor and look out for pages where you've got canonicalization issues. You can use Search Console for this. You want to be looking for where it gives you, say, duplicate, node, canonical defined, duplicate, different version of the canonical chosen. You can see that in Google Search Console. You can get data on this. So keep an eye out for that there and try and fix any that you find and make sure that, again, you're consistent with your other SEO elements. So make sure your site map, internal links, hreflang tags if you're using those are all consistent with the canonical URLs. So you want to make sure you try and link wherever possible to the canonical version. So you know.

Speaker 1: 9:33

That being said, on how you should do it, here's some of the sort of issues I've seen and common mistakes that people do and you want to try and avoid. So the first stuff is, you know, canonicalizing all pages to the homepage. I've seen some people get confused about how to do this and they've just canonicalized every page on their website to their homepage, which really confuses the search engine, because it's basically telling the search engine that all the content is the same as the homepage, which isn't helpful. So make sure you don't do that one. You want to use relative URLs in canonical tags. Like I said earlier, always make sure that you use absolute URLs in your canonical tag and not relative URLs, because that can cause confusion, especially if you've got content across multiple domains Paginated content this is another one where people often get confused on what to do.

Speaker 1: 10:21

If you've got like paginated content, like a blog archive or like an e-commerce page with pages and pages of products in, say, in the shoe category page one, page two, page three don't just canonicalize them all to the main category page. Instead, let each paginated page be canonical to itself. It's quite common that people will put them all back to the main category page without all the paginated pages. It's important to do without all the paginated pages. It's important to do it with the paginated pages.

Speaker 1: 10:50

Inconsistent use of training slashes is another one that people do. So, for example, if you've got a URL, say https//wwwexamplecom/page and https//wwwexamplecom/page/, you might find that your website will also send them both to the same page. Technically, as far as Google is concerned, it will see those as two separate pages potentially. So you want to make sure that you canonicalize just the one version and you want to make sure that throughout your site, wherever possible, if you're going to not have slashes, trading slashes, or you are going to have selling slashes, try and be consistent throughout your site wherever possible. If you're going to not have slashes, trading slashes, or you are going to have selling trashes, try and be consistent throughout the site.

Speaker 1: 11:28

Another one is I've seen people canonicalizing versions to a page that's got a noindex meta tag. So a noindex meta tag is essentially telling Google don't index this page. And then you're canonicalizing lots of content to a page that you're telling Google not to index, which means just means you know a if. If google gets treats that right, it's going to not index any of your content. If it doesn't treat it right, it's still going to confuse the hell out of it. So don't canonicalize to a no indexed page unless that's really what you want to do. I don't know why you would want to do that. Also, make sure you need to update your canonical tags if you make site changes. This goes back to that same. We've got 301, things like that. You want to make sure that if a url of a page changes to a new url, you want to have that clinical tag change as well. Otherwise you know you're going to be sending potentially sending canonicals first through 301s and again not best practice.

Speaker 1: 12:21

And the final one is that some people sometimes rely solely on clinical tags and then just do whatever the hell they want on the rest of the site. So you know they'll say I've got my Chronicle tag. Google will know what the Chronicle version is. I don't have to necessarily link to the right version, I don't necessarily have to get the content right in different places. I can just rely on that. I will not link and provide all of the signals that Google chooses when it's thinking about what the Chronicle version of the page is, because, for all that I've talked about this Chronicle tag, google will treat it only as a hint, not as a directive. So this means that Google reserves the right to say actually, although you're saying this is a Chronicle tag. All these other signals are suggesting to me that it's not the Chronicle version, so I'm going to ignore it. So this is where you need to be consistent.

Speaker 1: 13:13

So if you've chosen a Chronicle URL for a piece of content, make sure all your internal links point to the Chronicle version of the content and not to the other duplicate versions. And the same with things like your sitemap and other things like that Make sure they all point to the same version. So I hope that was useful. I hope it's cleared up on. You know, even if it's just what canonicalization is in the first place for you and you've got something to go and research to make sure you're getting it right. I know it's tricky when you know we talk you html code or any kind of code on a podcast. It's very hard because you're not seeing it, um. But hopefully now you understand why canonical, what a, what canonical version is b, why they exist and c, at least have a starting point to go work out how to implement in them. So yeah, that's it for today and until next time.

Speaker 1: 14:04

You know, keep optimizing, stay, stay curious and remember SEO is not that for Ed Dawson. On both you can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform Keywords People Use at keywordspeoplesusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimise and continually refine your content. Targeted, personalised advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.