Establishing a canonical URL involves dealing with duplicate addresses. It should not be used as a means of concentrating pages with different products or search purposes into one address.
In what situations would you need it?
Let's assume that there are multiple addresses with only campaign tracking values attached to the same service page. If the content conveyed to the user is the same, signals can be organized by representative address. Conversely, if the terms and conditions or product composition for each country are actually different, you should first check whether there is a reason to maintain a separate page.
A declaration is different from a mandatory command
Google looks for signals such as redirects, rel=canonical, and sitemaps. Since pointing to different representative addresses complicates interpretation, internal links and sitemaps should also match the intended address. After entering the settings, check the actual selection results in URL inspection.
Differences from redirect and noindex
A redirect moves visitors to a different address. Pages with a canonical declaration remain accessible. noindex is for the purpose of excluding indexing, and it is not recommended to use it instead as a method of selecting representative URLs for duplicate pages.
Key takeaways
- It deals with representative addresses with the same or very similar content.
- Compare the declared address with the search engine selection results.
- Match internal links, sitemaps, and redirect signals.