What is Canonical Tag - Give its Detailed View

Canonical tags are the necessary code to identify the original websites among the duplicates. It helps during Search engine optimization to display the relevant in SERPs. Benefits, implementation, and position, which are the overview of canonical tags, are explained in this article.

MiaMay 16, 2023 & 17:00 [IST]

What is Canonical Tag

Digital marketing is an emerging field and experts confirm that it will continuously witness a boom. Everything is digitalized, for example, financial data, footage, speeches, currency, and so on.

However, the internet is the hero of this field whereas SEO factors are the game changers. Anyone can access the internet just by paying a particular amount but, surviving in digital marketing requires strong SEO practices.

Online world is completely developed with HTML & CSS and designed with UX/UI, graphics, and web design strategies. In the development phases, there are many different codes, which you need to focus on varieties of tags such as title, Meta description, heading, open graphs, robots, and canonical tags.

Up-listed tags play a vital role during Search Engine Optimization and indicate information present on your websites. Each code has a different meaning among that, canonical tags hold a significant place in optimizing. Let’s explore it in detail.

What is Canonical Tag?

A code snippet of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) helps the search engine to identify the webpage’s main or original version among the other identical pages.

In simple words, exact location of the page that the user is looking for. Instead of displaying the overall website, with the help of canonical tags Search Engine fetches the accurate answers for every user’s search.

For example, <link rel=”canonical” herf=http://www.answers.com”>


How Can You See Them?

You can watch the example from your search page results by following the 3 steps.

  • Do right-click then, click on the view page source

  • Ctrl +F and type as canonical

  • Now, you can view the href with URL parts as mentioned in the above example.

On every page, you can witness a canonical tag that is preferred to an index during relevant searches.


Where it is Used?

Canonical tags are typically used in the header section of HTML. It is used to represent main version of the content page and does not apply to images or other media.


Reasons for Including Canonical Tags to Improve SEO

Using canonical tags to refer to the master page provides several benefits, let’s dig deeper.


1. To Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

Google’s ultimate aim is to fetch the most relevant informational sites for every user search. In that instance, this small code snippet helps search engines to fetch the exact result page. So your website can escape the risk of duplicate content issues as well as lower rankings.  


2. Strengthen Link Quality

Using canonical tags in the master page across multiple versions maximizes the potential ranking power.


3. Improvising Crawl Efficiency

This tag helps the search engine to crawl the original pages despite multiple versions or duplicates. Therefore, canonical tags reduce the indexing and crawling time & budget of search engines like Google and also, speed up the crawling efficiency.


4. Enhancing User Experience

Canonical tags are not only beneficial for search engine but also increase the usability of websites. Landing on the exact result pages that satisfy users and helps identify the apt solution for their searches.


Implementation Rules Of Canonical Tags

In this section, you can aware of the simple rules to insert canonical tags on the website.

Accurate And Lower URLs

Follow the exact structure to place canonical tags, avoid placing them in the relative paths.

<link rel=”canonical” herf=http://www.answers.com/sample-page/’/”> is the appropriate structure for using canonical tags.

And use lowercase URLs because the upper and lowercase references can make a difference during search engine crawlings.  

One Tag For One Page

When placing more than one tag on your website, then search engines ignore overall pages and don’t consider them for indexing. So, include one per page.

Self Referential Canonical

Using self-referential tags is preferred by webmasters, and helps the search engine to crawl more effectively and increases rankings. Such self-referential tag is the best practice to follow and pick the correct version of URLs.


Last Few Words

In conclusion, canonical tags are a powerful tool to display the main versions of a webpage. Including them properly creates positive impacts during every search and surely, helps the search engine to bring the exact canonical version pages. In the whole puzzle of SEO, canonical tags are a small piece so, ensure that, you utilize them to leverage better SERPs and rankings.


Digital marketing is an emerging field and experts confirm that it will continuously witness a boom. Everything is digitalized, for example, financial data, footage, speeches, currency, and so on.

However, the internet is the hero of this field whereas SEO factors are the game changers. Anyone can access the internet just by paying a particular amount but, surviving in digital marketing requires strong SEO practices.

Online world is completely developed with HTML & CSS and designed with UX/UI, graphics, and web design strategies. In the development phases, there are many different codes, which you need to focus on varieties of tags such as title, Meta description, heading, open graphs, robots, and canonical tags.

Up-listed tags play a vital role during Search Engine Optimization and indicate information present on your websites. Each code has a different meaning among that, canonical tags hold a significant place in optimizing. Let’s explore it in detail.

What is Canonical Tag?

A code snippet of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) helps the search engine to identify the webpage’s main or original version among the other identical pages.

In simple words, exact location of the page that the user is looking for. Instead of displaying the overall website, with the help of canonical tags Search Engine fetches the accurate answers for every user’s search.

For example, <link rel=”canonical” herf=http://www.answers.com”>

How Can You See Them?

You can watch the example from your search page results by following the 3 steps.

  • Do right-click then, click on the view page source

  • Ctrl +F and type as canonical

  • Now, you can view the href with URL parts as mentioned in the above example.

On every page, you can witness a canonical tag that is preferred to an index during relevant searches.

Where it is Used?

Canonical tags are typically used in the header section of HTML. It is used to represent main version of the content page and does not apply to images or other media.

Reasons for Including Canonical Tags to Improve SEO

Using canonical tags to refer to the master page provides several benefits, let’s dig deeper.

1. To Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

Google’s ultimate aim is to fetch the most relevant informational sites for every user search. In that instance, this small code snippet helps search engines to fetch the exact result page. So your website can escape the risk of duplicate content issues as well as lower rankings.  

2. Strengthen Link Quality

Using canonical tags in the master page across multiple versions maximizes the potential ranking power.

3. Improvising Crawl Efficiency

This tag helps the search engine to crawl the original pages despite multiple versions or duplicates. Therefore, canonical tags reduce the indexing and crawling time & budget of search engines like Google and also, speed up the crawling efficiency.

4. Enhancing User Experience

Canonical tags are not only beneficial for search engine but also increase the usability of websites. Landing on the exact result pages that satisfy users and helps identify the apt solution for their searches.

Implementation Rules Of Canonical Tags

In this section, you can aware of the simple rules to insert canonical tags on the website.

Accurate And Lower URLs

Follow the exact structure to place canonical tags, avoid placing them in the relative paths.

<link rel=”canonical” herf=http://www.answers.com/sample-page/’/”> is the appropriate structure for using canonical tags.

And use lowercase URLs because the upper and lowercase references can make a difference during search engine crawlings.  

One Tag For One Page

When placing more than one tag on your website, then search engines ignore overall pages and don’t consider them for indexing. So, include one per page.

Self Referential Canonical

Using self-referential tags is preferred by webmasters, and helps the search engine to crawl more effectively and increases rankings. Such self-referential tag is the best practice to follow and pick the correct version of URLs.

Last Few Words

In conclusion, canonical tags are a powerful tool to display the main versions of a webpage. Including them properly creates positive impacts during every search and surely, helps the search engine to bring the exact canonical version pages. In the whole puzzle of SEO, canonical tags are a small piece so, ensure that, you utilize them to leverage better SERPs and rankings.

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