Getting started with canonical URLs
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. A short on-ramp to canonical URLs for teams who have not touched it before.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The reason this keeps coming up
Canonicals tell search engines which version is the real one. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Parameters and print views create duplicates quietly
- Change one thing and measure it
Self-referencing canonicals are a safe default. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The short version
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about canonical URLs before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Parameters and print views create duplicates quietly — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.