Canonical URLs are used to reduce duplicate URLs and increase your search engine optimization (SEO). Canonical URLs are increasingly important for maintaining differentiation between your companies content and a URL that is similar to yours.
Canonical URLs act as an authoritative URL and are used to identify the "original" or "preferred" version of a web page. For instance, there can be many URL versions of the singular web page and search engines (Google, Yahoo Finance, Bing) struggle to depict which URL/page is the best and most accurate.
Canonical URLs also help clean up the URL that may link you to a specific item/product within the website. This in turn simplifies the tracking and record-keeping of the products, which makes things very organized and simple to access.
The use of canonical URLs is becoming more and more important as companies attempt to uniquely brand themselves. Look into whether your companies website has a canonical URL, and if not, consider adding one to help organize and increase SEO.
How do I create a canonical URL?
You can create a canonical URL by adding a rel="canonical" link element to the <head> section of your HTML document, with the href attribute pointing to the preferred version of the page.
Why is it important to use canonical URLs?
Canonical URLs are important because they help search engines understand which version of a web page should be indexed and avoid duplicate content issues. This can improve your website's SEO performance and help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Fun Fact:
"Canonical URLs can help improve search engine optimization (SEO) by helping to reduce duplicate content. According to a study conducted by Ahrefs, using canonical URLs can increase organic traffic by up to 30%." (Ahrefs, 2019).