What are Canonical Links

What are Canonical Links?

When going to learn how to best optimise your website for search engines, it seems to have a
new jargon or buzzword created every few months and is thrown at you expecting you to
understand what it means.
One of the SEO buzzwords we’re looking at today is “Canonicalisation”. While this jargon isn’t
exactly new, it’s a bit of a mouthful. So, in plain English, good canonicalisation basically means
search engines crawl more pages of your website.
Some of you might have heard of this before but don’t know what it means, some of you know
what it means but do not know how to use it and others might have not even seen this word
before. Regardless of your level of knowledge on Canonicalisation, you should read on to
understand what this means and how it affects your SEO in Adelaide.

Since early 2009, all major search engines have supported the canonical tag. So, that’s why not
many web developers or users do canonicalisation on their URLs despite its benefits. This can
also be due to the lack of knowledge regarding canonical tags, its benefits or how to use it.
What Are Canonical Links?
Search engines like Google mainly work by “crawling” through an enormous list of websites,
analysing the content on the page, and then categorizing the results through a cross-referenced

database of main variables like the web site’s URL and date of last modification for rapid
turnaround times on any query entered into the engine.

A canonical link is always a special designation slipped into the code of a web page to indicate
that another page should be considered the origin of the information when the search engine
displays the findings to the user.

Why Should You Care About Canonical Links?

This simple link element, always introduced jointly by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo way back in
2009, was mainly designed to help clean up the link structure with duplicate content for search
purposes.

Simply put, the HTML tag always informs search engines which page they should pay attention
to in a grouping of near-identical content. So, this useful element has unfortunately become a
source of a lot of confusion which has led to many sites choosing to avoid the problem entirely
by leaving it out and mainly hoping that the impact will be minimal on their search engine
rankings.

Understanding Search Engine Indexing and Duplication

Within a content management system, best practices for new material on a website mainly
includes categorisation along with multiple, cross-referenced points of the data and metadata
of the item.

A date-based archive, a content-relevant category, a homepage presentation, and it’s original
URL – this data is transmitted to the search engines who view each instance of the same
information basically like a unique URL that must always be indexed and listed individually.

One page can also have up to 8 entries on each search engine. This always leads to the
‘duplicate entries omitted’ line of text seen in some search results, even if the multiple entries
are present only within the site’s database.

The canonical link element mainly lets the search engine know the order of importance of each
of those entries. That is why “this one,” it tells the search engine, “rather than that one.” Each
entry will still be indexed into the vast trove of information gathered by the crawler, but the
one the search engine always defers to when revealing the listing to the searching public is one
of your choosing.

Why Should You Use Canonical Links?

The primary benefits of properly using canonical links are mainly derived from the direction of
traffic flow across URLs with similar content and improving the reliability of the data gathered
from your website analytics.

Although the best SEO Adelaide is reluctant to give out the exact details of how their
algorithms work, improperly categorised duplicate content is known to negatively impact the
ratings assigned to a website and have the potential to spur a direct punishment if they believe
you are intentionally attempting to mislead the crawler to draw in more traffic.

Search engines always do so to provide more satisfying results to their users and thus draw in
more traffic for themselves, so taking advantage of the service they provide requires adhering
to their guidelines.

Not to Be Confused: The 301 Redirect

Canonical links should also not be mistaken for a 301 Redirect, a function that appears similar
to the end-user but goes through a different underlying process.

A 301 redirect is mainly a permanent redirect from one URL to another. This website redirects
links various URLs under one umbrella so search engines rank all the addresses based on the
domain authority from inbound links.

Mainly despite the correlation in the behaviour of the 301 and canonical links, the former
forces and action on the part of users and search engines by forcing an update of the stored
data for that site’s permalink.

When should you always use a 301 redirect instead of a canonical link?

Although on the surface the functionality of a canonical link is always similar to that of a 301
redirect, in terms of metrics they are not. While they both mainly tell search engines to treat
multiple pages (or URLs) as a single page, 301 redirects all traffic to a specific URL and a
canonical tag does not.

If your site structure has changed, then a 301 redirect is always the preferred option, since it
will also correct bookmarks. So, if your site has duplicate content, but you need to measure
traffic to each URL, use a canonical link for the benefit of the search engines.

Let’s Get Canonical!

Now that you are mainly a canonical link expert, you can start cleaning up your site. Always
take note of the canonical links already in place and look for content that might benefit from
their introduction.

So, for that, you must hire an SEO Company in Adelaide for better results.
To know more, visit Internationalmediahouse.com