Canonical is only for Find out duplicate ?

Hi BHW Family,

I have one question regarding canonical, its only to prevent the duplicate content and URL. Its just to intimate the search engines for redirection ..

Is anyother SEO benefit ?

We Bring Rank said:

Hi BHW Family,

I have one question regarding canonical, its only to prevent the duplicate content and URL. Its just to intimate the search engines for redirection ..

Is anyother SEO benefit ?

Click to expand...

It also prevents a certain class of negative SEO attacks involving making bogus URLs for ranking pages which can then either be used for submitting duplicate content to google or used in pump and delist schemes.

Every page should have a canonical. It is probably the most value packed tag after the title tag and meta description tag.

SEOs suggest you have Canonical URL tags applied whenever any of the following scenarios arise:

1.WWW versus Non-WWW
Your website generates the share multiple links to go to the same page. Like http://www.example.com & http://example.com will lead to the same page

2.Pagination or Filtering
When there are multiple pages in a website that could have the similar content; i.e. either the products are similar but only differ by color or other options, or the pages are produced by different sort orders like “by price” or some other variable, that essentially produces the same content.

3.Tracking Codes or Session IDs
Many technologies require that you add a tracking variable on the end of URLs that either link to your site or link internally. The format is similar to www.example.com?tracking-variable or might look like www.example.com/example.htm?tracking-code

Canonicalization should be used when multiple pages have the same content but different URLs, and you need to instruct the search engines which version to index and rank, so in terms of SEO it can help you to direct all the juice to one page instead of spliting it between several versions of it, and also prevent the duplication issues. Still, you should only use it for the pages which have the very same or almost the same content.

It can also help if you have any kind of dynamic URLs or dynamic pages generated endlessly due to filtering parameters on product pages or pagination; with the help of canonicals you can make sure that the proper version of a page will be indexed and shown in the search results.

And when you mess canonical up, you'll ruin your entire site.

I was asked to work on a site that I thought had a penalty, nothing would rank no matter what, not even rare and easy long tails. Then one day noticed the canonical tag, removed it and the site came back to life 3 weeks later. So watch out cuz it's a powerful tag.

Choosing a proper canonical URL for every set of similar URLs improves the SEO of your website. Because the search engine knows which version is canonical, it can count all the links towards all the different versions, as links to that single version. Setting a canonical is similar to doing a 301 redirect, but without actually redirecting. With canonical tag you can easily track the visitors for all the similar urls.

This will also protects from the negative effects of SEO.