Do I need a canonical?

Also known as a rel canonical, a canonical is a way of telling a search engine that the given URL is the preferred (or original) version of a webpage.

They act as a surefire way to ensure you and your website aren’t penalised by Google or other search engines for indexing duplicated content.

While you might not be able to see them when browsing, in the back-end your canonicals are working hard to ensure the search engines don’t think you’re duplicating content.

But how do you know when to use one? We’ve put together this handy flowchart to help you with just that!

Hi! I’m Ben, CEO of The SEO Works

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