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Attribute rel = "canonical. Use Guide

As we mentioned earlier, duplicate pages on the site are an extremely undesirable phenomenon. Their presence can mislead visitors and, most importantly, search bots, which has a very negative effect on the promotion of the website as a whole.

In most cases content duplication eliminated by banal delete repeating pages or use redirect 301.

But there are cases where the attribute rel = "canonical" is a more convenient option.. For example, if you remove duplicate content and prevent its appearance in the future, it is technically difficult to implement. Or you just want to leave all the pages in the public domain for users, despite the uniqueness of the content posted on them.

By the way, the rel = “canonical” tag is very often incorrectly mentioned on the network. The correct option is the attribute rel = "canonical" tag < link >.

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How to use the rel = “canonical” attribute to remove duplicate content

This attribute exists to provide search engine robots with information about which of the duplicate pages is canonical.. In particular, we are talking about indicating a canonical link.

If you suddenly do not know what canonical reference is, imagine a situation where the same content is available at once at several addresses:

Canonical links are preferred addresses of similar pages that should be considered by search engines (in your opinion). Further in the text, we will also use the term “canonical URL”.

Typically, a canonical link is the address of the source page on which duplicate content was originally posted.

Suppose that in the example under consideration, the third address is canonical URL. Then to the code of the first two pages in sections < head > you need to enter the rel = "canonical" attribute to assign a canonical URL:

After that, visitors and robots will still be able to view all three options, but only the page that will have canonical URL will be taken into account when indexing.

Features of applying the attribute rel = "canonical"

  1. For search engine robots, the canonical URL declared when using the < link > tag, is not an unquestioning indication, but only a recommended option, which in some cases may be ignored.
     
  2. Maybe you should also use in the code of the preferred page with a link to her same. This will allow search robots to define it as the main one even if you call on it from automatically generated addresses.
     
  3. Canonical URL should lead to an existing page.
     
  4. Within one page no more than one canonical link.
     
  5. Canonical URL cannot be on another domain (or a subdomain in the case of Yandex).
     
  6. It is not recommended to build canonical links in a chain:


     
  7. It is inappropriate to use this attribute together with the meta-category robots, since the instructions of the latter will always be considered more
    priority. And therefore, if an indication is used in it noindex, nofollow, the page will not be indexed even if you are indicated in the < link > tag that its URL is canonical.
     
  8. Before specifying a canonical URL, you need to make sure that the page that is posted on it, not closed from indexing in robots.txt.
     
  9. It will not be possible to remove duplicate content if different canonical URLs are indicated in the code of all identical pages. In this case, the recommendations are likely to be ignored.
     
  10. It is recommended to prescribe absolute link addresses rather than relative.


     
  11. It is believed that if you specify a canonical URL, the preferred page will be transferred almost without loss the total weight of its takes.

Summing up...

... I would like to say that the rel = “canonical” attribute is a very convenient tool that, although it cannot remove duplicate content in the literal sense, but at the same time makes it possible for search engines to close their eyes to its presence.

It is only important to correctly determine the canonical URL corresponding to the page that really should be ranked.

Do you take this rather convenient opportunity? Or do you prefer other ways to get rid of page takes?