Canonical URL: what it is, how to set it up and avoid duplicate content

Is your site losing positions in Google, even though the content is of high quality? It could be because of duplicate content that spreads out the SEO power of your pages. Spoiler alert: canonical URL solves this problem in 5 minutes of setup.

⚡In Brief

  • ✅ Canonical URL: a way to tell Google the main version of the page among duplicates

  • ✅ Solves the problem: duplicate content due to UTM tags, filters, pagination

  • ✅ Simple: one tag in HTML code consolidates the SEO power of all versions

  • ✅ Must have for: online stores, multilingual sites, sites with filters

  • 🎯 You get: step-by-step instructions on how to set up canonical for different CMS

  • 👇 Read more below - with code examples and screenshots

Article content:

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🎯 What is a Canonical URL

A canonical URL is a way to tell search engines which version of a page is the main one when there are multiple URLs with the same or very similar content.

📊The problem of duplicate content

Imagine that your online store sells smartphones. The same product page can be available at different addresses:

  • 🔗 example.com/smartphones/iphone-15 (basic version)

  • 🔗 example.com/smartphones/iphone-15?color=black (with color filter)

  • 🔗 example.com/smartphones/iphone-15?utm_source=facebook (with UTM tag)

  • 🔗 example.com/smartphones/iphone-15?ref=email (with referral tag)

Google sees this as 4 different pages with the same content. The result: SEO power is dispersed, no version ranks well.

👉 Case study: an online clothing store had 500 products, but due to filters (size, color, price), Google indexed 12,000 URLs. After setting up canonical, the number of indexed pages decreased to 500, and organic traffic grew by 40%.

Duplicate content negatively affects site rankings because Google does not understand which version to show users.

✅ Quick conclusion: canonical URL points Google to the main version of the page and consolidates the SEO power of all duplicates.

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🔬 How a canonical tag works

A canonical tag is an HTML element that is placed in the

Ключові слова:

canonical urlcanonical тегдублі контентуseo оптимізаціяrel canonicalналаштування canonicalgoogle search consoleтехнічне seoduplicate contentканонічнаUrl