What is a Canonical URL?
The “master version” of a page on your website that you want search engine crawlers to find. As you launch marketing campaigns and track users, information gets added to the end of your unique page URLs. From the crawlers‚Äô point of view, this means you have multiple versions of the same page without a clear indication of which one is “right.” When you set up a canonical URL in the page’s HTML, you tell search engines which version of the page you want visitors to see.
Example
For example, consider a blog post that can be accessed through multiple URLs due to parameters like sorting options or tracking parameters. The canonical URL tag is added to all variations of the URL, indicating the preferred version. Search engines then recognize this canonical URL as the primary version to index and display in search results, consolidating the page’s ranking signals and avoiding dilution of SEO authority across multiple URLs.