What is a Canonical tag?

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A canonical tag shows what the original URL of a specific page is when multiple pages are written about the same thing.

It displays a URL tag which is the original URL of a specific page when multiple pages have been written about the same content. This specifies which pages search engines, including Google, should index if multiple pages exist on the same topic. This is displayed on the original page using a self-referencing canonical tag. While similar pages have this tag which refers to the original page. When there are no comparable pages, there is often still a self-referring canonical tag. This shows Google or other search engines that this page is the only version of this page with this content and can be indexed.

How does a canonical tag work?

You should keep in mind that only one page with a certain topic is referred to, with a canonical tag. For example, page 2 can refer to page 1, but then page 1 cannot refer to page 2. This way the ranking of these pages is not negatively affected and you have some control over the equivalent pages. Therefore, make sure that you create the desired result when you enter the tags. You should therefore ask yourself the question: “Where does my target group(s) end up? Do you want them to be able to find all pages on this topic, or just the page with the self-referring canonical tag?”. These are things to keep in mind when installing the URL tags.

Where do you place a canonical tag?

Where exactly are you implementing this? The canonical tags are implemented in the web page via programming language and you can see this specifically in the <head> section of the page. To this <head> section of a page you add a <link> element, this indicates if the page is the original page or not. This is because you refer to the page itself (as with a self-referring canonical tag) or you refer to the original version of the page.

How does Google use canonical tags?

How does Google deal with this? Canonical tags are used to give a clear signal to Google which pages should be visible. Search engines do not always accept them, so they choose for themselves what would be the best result. To follow this you can use Google Search Console. This is a URL inspection tool by Google that shows which URLs Google previously indexed.