Have you ever thought that your site may contain certain pages that can be accessed through different links?
In fact, most websites spread across the Internet contain many different links, which ultimately lead to the same web page, or in other words, the content of a page can be accessed using more than one different URL!
This may cause a negative impact on the ranking of your site and its pages within the results of various search engines, so it is necessary for you to learn how to solve this problem by using canonical links.
In this article, you will learn about one of the most important factors that significantly affect site optimization in search engines and through which website owners achieve remarkable progress in search engines. Today is our time to talk about the importance of assigning and allocating canonical links to the pages of your website to improve the process of archiving it in search engines. Various searches.
Examples that illustrate the concept of canonical links and their importance
Before we discuss how to use these links, their importance on your site, and their positive impact on the appearance of your site and its pages in search results. Let us review several examples that explain the concept of canonical links and show you some cases in which you need to use this type of link:
Links generated by site rankings
As a WordPress user, you know very well that you can assign one of your site’s articles and add it to more than one category within the site, whether it is a primary category or a subcategory:
The previous image shows an article on a site that publishes content related to food recipes and foods. As you can notice, the article is assigned to two different categories: (Healthy Recipes) and (Food Recipes).
In this case, if the permanent links to your site contain the name of the category, the previous article will have two different links, each link specific to one of these two categories.
So the first link to the article is as follows:
www.yoursite.com/article/healthy recipes
The second link to the same second article is as follows:
www.yoursite.com/article/recipes
When entering any link, the visitor will be directed to the same article
Therefore, when search engines archive site links, they will discover that both links direct the visitor to the same content, and thus they will be considered “duplicate content” within the site, and this would negatively affect your site’s ranking in search results.
Imagine when you add 10 categories within one article, in this case there are 10 different links leading to the same article and the same content!
In this case, you can solve the problem of duplicate content on category pages by using Canonical links in ways that we will fully explain within the article.
Links generated by going to the HTTPS version of the site
Another example that shows you another case of multiple links leading to the same content within a website, which is when your site does not use an SSL security certificate, then the site links will start with the HTTP protocol. In this case, search engines will archive the site links that start with HTTP.
After a while, if you install an SSL certificate, your site’s links will start using the HTTPS protocol, and the shape and configuration of the links will differ from their configuration before installing the certificate.
In this case, there will be more than one combination of links to your website, and search engines will crawl your website links in two different ways.
- The first method is in which website links begin with HTTP, such as: http://www.Example.com
- While the second method is in which website links start with HTTPS, such as: https://www.Example.com
Therefore, pages with HTTP links will be considered different from pages with HTTPS links.
In this case, you must use Canonical links to tell the search engine your preferred version, which the search engine must adopt and display in the search results to website visitors (here it is definitely preferable to have the https version).
Links generated from product categories in Woocommerce
If you are one of the owners of WordPress websites that use the Woocommerce plugin or similar plugins designed to manage an online store. Most likely, you will have a lot of repeated links that lead to the same web page.
To illustrate the idea, let us assume that your online store displays a “T-shirt” product in three different colors, such as (black – yellow – blue):
In this case, when the visitor clicks on the black color, the link to the product page will look like this:
www.Example.com/shop/t-shirt?color=Black
While when he clicks on the blue color, he will remain on the same page, but the link will change to the following form:
www.Example.com/shop/t-shirt?color=Blue
When he clicks on the yellow color, the link will change to:
www.Example.com/shop/t-shirt?color=Yellow
This type of link is called parameterized URLs. Note here that the link is exactly the same, but only one word changes at the end of the link to the product that expresses the color variable and takes one of the values (Black, Blue, or Yellow).
In fact, search engines consider these three links as three different pages, even though they lead to the same page that displays the same product information, with only the color information differing.
This represents a huge burden on search engines, which archive thousands of pages that may exist on your site, because they will have to read 3 different links from each other for each product.
In this case, you can set the Canonical link for the product page, and specify only one of the three links to be the preferred canonical link for the product page. Thus, the efficiency of search spiders will increase when they archive and read product pages within your online store.
The importance of using Canonical links within the site
Perhaps now, after the previous examples, you have learned about the importance of using canonical links within the site to avoid the problem of search engines reading site links that lead to the same content in more than one format and more than one URL structure.
The most important importance of using canonical links is that they help search engines save the time it takes to read the content of your website, its various pages and links. So setting Canonical links to search engines is important.
When you specify for search engines the preferred primary link for the pages of your site, which have several links leading to them, they will archive this link only and will save time in archiving other links, and this in turn gives the site importance and priority to appear in search results in front of visitors.
Since most website owners do not care about setting these links on their sites, it is possible to outperform your competitors in any field when you set canonical links to your site pages well.
To clarify the importance of using canonical links for your site, let us return to the first example that we previously explained at the beginning of the article, which concerns duplicate links resulting from assigning more than one category to one article on the site. In this case, if we assign the first link:
www.Example.com/article/healthyrecipes/
As it is the canonical link, Google will adopt this link as the unified primary link for the article and will neglect to archive and show the other link:
www.Example.com/article/recipes
In addition, you will not receive a notification that there is duplicate content on your site resulting from more than one link leading to the same article.
How to set the canonical link
Now that you know the great importance of setting basic links to website pages, and their positive impact on improving the search engine experience within your site, let us move on to the methods of setting basic links to WordPress website pages.
Set Canonical link using plugins
You can use one of the SEO plugins that provides you with the option to set a canonical link to any article or page within your site with ease.
For example if you use the Yoast plugin . Then, when you enter the editing page for any article or page on your site, you will find the Advanced tab at the bottom of the article editing page, in which you will find a text field titled Canonical URL dedicated to entering the preferred primary link for your article within it:
Therefore, when you save the article, search engines will be informed that the link you pasted into the Canonical URL is the primary and preferred link for the article, and accordingly the search engine will neglect to archive all other links that lead to the same article, which saves time for search spiders when archiving your site links. Thus, the site will gain the trust of search engines, and this will be reflected in improving its appearance in search results.
Manually set canonical link
The other way to add the anchor link to any of your website pages is the manual method. This is done by using a specific HTML code that is added to set the preferred link for any page of the site.
In this case, you must have access to the source code of the site pages. It is a very sensitive matter. Therefore, we do not advise you to modify the source code of your site unless you have the necessary skills to do so.
To set the primary link for any of the site’s pages, you can add the following code inside the <head> tag of each of the pages that have multiple links leading to it:
<"link rel="canonical" href="URL>
Replace the URL with the preferred link that you want search engines to consider as the primary link to index the page.
Note 1: Whether you choose the first method or the second method to add main links to your site, we point out the necessity of using absolute URLs and not using relative paths.
That is, use the following method to write the link:
<”/link rel = “canonical” href = “https://example.com/sample-page>
Not the following method:
<”/link rel = “canonical” href = ”/sample-page>
Note : When you add more than one canonical link to the same page within your site, this leads to the search engine ignoring all the links and thus you will not benefit from any of them.
Therefore, make sure to set only one canonical link for each page of your site.
Frequently asked questions about Canonical links
In this paragraph, we will answer the most important questions that may be on the minds of our esteemed readers about the concept of canonical links. You can add your question in the comments below the article so that we can answer it and add it to the paragraph for the benefit of all honorable visitors.
What happens if I don’t set canonical links for site pages?
One question you might have now is what happens when I don’t set the canonical link for a page on the site that has more than one different link to access it.
In this case, if you have a page or article on your site that has more than one link leading to it, in this case it will be up to the search engines to determine which link to show to site visitors within the search results.
But we recommend setting canonical links for the site’s pages, because this helps search engines archive the site and its pages in a more efficient way, and improves the appearance of the site’s links in search results, as we mentioned previously.
When does my website need to add and set Canonical links?
Canonical links are very important if your site contains many pages that have more than one link leading to them.
If your website contains a small number of pages with fixed and non-recurring content, it will not be necessary to set basic links to its pages, but at the same time it will not harm your site if you set them.
Can the home page link be set as a canonical link for all pages or articles on the site?
Some website owners prefer that the search engine displays the home page link in the search results instead of links to articles or sub-pages on the site. So they place the home page link as a Canonical link inside the articles and sub-pages.
This is wrong behavior, as it is not appropriate to place the home page link as a canonical link for one of the pages or articles that contains content different from the home page, because the basic function of canonical links, as we explained, is to unify the various links that lead to a page and adopt one primary link among them. For this page, in this case the link to the home page will be completely different from the link to the articles and sub-pages in terms of the link configuration itself.
But if you want search engines to give priority to the main page in appearing on sub-pages of a site, the best solution here is to insert internal links from the site’s article pages to the main page, and in this way search engines will give priority to the main page in appearing in search results instead of Links to articles and subpages.
Conclusion
If you have not used canonical links within your website before, you can start now to review the pages and links of your site and assign canonical links to them. Thus, you can gain the trust of search engines and make them give an additional advantage to your site by saving the time spent on archiving different links that lead to the same content. You also avoid having your content evaluated by search engines as duplicate and useless content.
Canonical links are something that many website owners do not give enough attention to, which makes them a very important strength for your website. So make sure to take advantage of it and set it correctly, as we explained to you in this article.
You can also see the most famous SEO mistakes that we talked about before, which negatively affect the indexing of your site with search engines, so you can avoid them in order to gain a better appearance in search results, and gain the trust of more visitors coming through search engines such as Google and others.
Finally, do not hesitate to leave your question or inquiry about setting basic links within your site in the comments below the article.
