Канонические страницы

Сanonical URL — is the Uniform Resource Locator that will be taken into account by search engines when indexing, as the most critical (necessary) in the presence of separate pages with different prefixes.

Сanonicalization | Deduplication — is the process of choosing a default canonical URL for a search engine when you have not defined and provided crawlers with information about which page is more important to consider.

Example 1: If there is a primary page and with Get parameters, Google itself chooses the representative one, unless you set it manually:

  • https://diamatti.ru/girls/leotards/mistique (Сanonical)
  • https://diamatti.ru/girls/leotards/mistique?oid=black-98
  • https://diamatti.ru/girls/leotards/mistique?oid=sky-blue-98

Example 2: In many large online stores, not all URLs are static, products can be sorted by brand, city or special filtering. The final model can have many addresses, but there should always be 1 main one if the information on all pages is identical.

Google really doesn't like duplicate content!

All behavioral factors, content and information from twin pages will be taken into account for the desired one, which has a canonical one.

Do not abuse this knowledge, do not engage in black or gray SEO.

For articles with canonical status on the main page, you will get a filter: misleading search engines to increase search queries for an irrelevant page:

  • not corresponding to the entered query,
  • + behavioral traffic rejection.

✅ In canonical, you must specify ulr without the slash "/" at the end

The exception: if you have Bitrix and you cannot remove the slash at the end.

How to set up

  • Set up a redirect to the desired page.
  • Specify in the Sitemap file the pages that should appear in the search.
  • Set up a link annotation with the rel="canonical" attribute.

In WordPress via Elementor: Elements → SEO → Advanced → Simply enter the entire desired address string in the Canonical URL field.

For example, I have a custom site, and for this page the canonical code is as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://topseoboss.com/en/internal-optimization/canonical" />

Как проверить

  • Посмотреть код.
  • Или используйте инструменты для анализа страницы. Это расширения для браузеров Chrome и Yandex. Установите и смотрите.

What to do if you accidentally made a mistake and specified the canonical page incorrectly, and the search engine has already indexed it

There is a small nuance - if you incorrectly specified the canonical page, the previous level or pulled up by copying another page. Google has a strict filter for this. It will index information from both - but when requests are made, the canonical one will be shown. If this does not suit you, then there are 2 ways to show the desired one. It is difficult to fix, but possible.

First, you need to specify the correct canonical URL on the page. For Yandex, this is enough. And send it to Yandex Webmaster for re-scanning. But in Google it will be a little more difficult. 2 stages, if the first does not help, after 2 weeks you can move on to the second.

Step 1️⃣: Send for reindexing in Google Search Console - there you will see information that the page is not canonical. Click the button at the top right: "Check page on the site" - and then again for reindexing. However, this does not always work. Check again in 3-4 days.

Step 2️⃣: Create an identical page with a different URL, perhaps slightly changing the information in the meta tags and content. And redirect your old one to it. Specify the new one as canonical. Wait 7-20 days. Be sure not to miss it - it needs to be monitored. As soon as the old URL appears in the search for the desired query, return it back, and redirect the new one to the old one.

I once spent a long time looking for this SEO mistake, a week passed - why is the wrong page shown for a certain request, but of the previous level. And the canonical was set correctly at that time, but Google did not want to recognize it. It so happened that the site admin copied the page of the previous level for the new one, and then changed the information on the spot. During this time, Google indexed, and its bot took into account the unnecessary canonical.

Yandex didn’t react at all – after all the maneuvers, no any position on the old URL was lost.

If you have any questions, then welcome to the official source - Google Textbooks.