Since the discovery of Sitemaps, the next biggest development in digital marketing is perhaps the recommendation and acceptance by Search Engines to use canonical tags to address the problem of duplicate content. Canonical URL assists SEO Singapore webmasters to tell search engines that several versions of a page are the same, and what to use. In this post, we look at the importance of canonical tags and why every e-commerce site should use them.
What Really is a Canonical Tag?
A canonical tag (rel=canonical) is a special HTML code that helps to avoid issues arising from duplicate pages/content. The operational principle is ensuring that you select the canonical version of duplicate pages so that Search Engines can know what to crawl and index. In a different way, consider canonical tags as 301 redirects without actually redirecting.
Make Sorting Various Options Easy and Fast
The commonest type of duplicate content in e-commerce is multiple sorting that generates near-identical content. However, implementing rel=canonicals makes it possible to keep all the pages as opposed to pulling down a few. This is critical especially if some of the pages had useful external links and blocking them can compromise the overall ranking of the site.
Make it Possible to ShareContent Across Domains
If you have an e-commerce store and want to use content from a different source; the target is giving clients the best while crediting the source. A win-win situation for both! When you apply e-commerce correct cross-domain rel=canonical tags, you can take an article from other posts or websites and show it to your clients. This is a great way to ensure that clients have the best especially when you want to add guest posts.
Addressing Products Appearing Multiple Categories
In e-commerce, it is not uncommon to get an item appearing in various categories when all the details, except minor alternations, are similar. Think of a toy maker with a similar brand in all aspects, but with varying colors. In such cases, the toys will easily fall into various categories by themes and colors, yet their descriptions remain the same.
From a usability point of view, rel=canonicals will help you address the issue. Though all the pages will be visible, only the one with URL featuring a rel=canonical will be indexed. Remember to maintain consistency when handling your canonicals location pages because only the preferred one will be shown to visitors on SERPs. Besides, you must carefully follow all the rules of onsite optimization to raise click-through rates and ranking.
Important Rules to Follow when Working on Canonical Tags
- Avoid canonizing paginated archives to the first page
- Be extra careful to ensure that every re=canonical tag is specific (do not leave out even small bits such as https)
- Ensure that every canonical tag is premised on the request URL
- Be cautious with multiple canonicals that link to your page. Though they may look okay, it is advisable to avoid them and go for specific re=canonicals.
