Canonicalization: SEO Mythbusting

In this episode of SEO Mythbusting season 2, Martin Splitt (Developer Advocate, Google) and Rachel Costello (Technical SEO Consultant, Builtvisible, at the time of recording Technical SEO & Content Manager, DeepCrawl) discuss the most common SEO questions and myths around canonicalization.

Specific timestamped topics discussed in this episode:
Canonicalization is not a topical grouping (0:00)
The most common canonicalization myths (1:29)
Is canonicalization a directive or a signal for Google Search? (2:01)
Should canonicalization be used as a redirect? (3:08)
What are the actual factors for duplication and deduplication? (4:25)
Site’s preference for the canonical URL vs user’s preference (7:33)
Canonicalization vs unique content on pages with a canonical tag (08:59)

Documentation mentioned in this episode:

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[SyedAbbas]

I really like this format. Its casual but packed with useful information. Looking forward to more of these videos.

[yaelperetz]

How should I proceed when I see that another website has duplicated my content and place the rel="canonical'' as if it were the original creator of the content, but they are not

[AndrewLeeTechTips]

lol that music at the beginning is so eerie I'm not gonna lie

[stefanpfadt]

Hi, just wondering if with Google`s mobile-first approach its recommended to switch canonical tags also to the mobile version?

[onyourmarknj]

If a local service business has multiple pages on their websites that are just slightly different (targeting different geographic areas) is Google likely to not index any of them based on duplicate content or could Google select one of those pages as the canonical url and only index one?

[udtateer]

Can the canonical url to be added in the script be same as the current page url ?

is that useful in any way ?

[joshuachoate]

Great information. Thank you for helping to clear this up.

[angelaliu]

Amazing video, extremely comprehensive. Just shared with my team, thanks for breaking down to all the possibilities and solutions.

[kristi_h]

Love it! Thanks, guys. Helpful and sharing with my teams!

[ihaveguts]

Great video: i have a question though. I just switched an old website to https and created a generic 301 redirect rule via htaccess. However, search console still consider the http adresses as canonical, telling me that the https is a duplicate. I made the switch on august 3rd... maybe i just have to wait? Or do you suggest to take another action? Thanks

[curtisstrite]

Canonicalization is probably the most misunderstood setting for site owners.

[mircic]

Why not add discovered, crawled and indexed pages with 0 impressions on performance tab list of google search console?

[pankajrawat]

Does anybody having indexing issues. Google found the content but not indexing it. Don't know why.

[BBI-Brandboost]

Here at BBI, we think that every page should be developed with content that is relevant, informative and search engine friendly. As web developers, when we build or upgrade a website, we always aim to ensure that SEO techniques are hard-wired into the website architecture. This video is very helpful in terms of how we can now approach canonical tags.

[ItamarBlauer]

Some very useful clarifications about the misconceptions of canonicalisation!

[aniqueimam]

Thanks for spreading useful knowledge... it all cleared my misconceptions regarding canonicalization. :)

[KuPu]

Hello, thank you for great video. Can i ask how u can create topic in timeline video? Like: "canonicalization is not a topic grouping", or "is canonicalization a directive or signal for google..". I want to create that in my channel. Thank you for answer :)

[SEOVideoShow]

I love these. Alot of knowledge to share on my show 😀

[BeFoundOnTheWeb]

I have a website I'm working on that sells solar services. I started creating location pages for all the cities that we service and it was recommended that I *not* create a page for the main city in our area - the one with the highest number of searches for CITYNAME + SOLAR - but instead use the home page for that primary keyword target. I really don't want to use that main city name on the home page due to the fact that we service so many cities in our area, which makes on-page SEO difficult for that primary keyword. I also don't want to keyword cannibalize the home page by creating a separate page for CITYNAME + SOLAR since we are currently ranking on the middle of page 2. So I was wondering if I could have the best of both worlds by creating a separate page for CITYNAME + SOLAR and canonicalizing it to the home page. But if you're saying the contents of the canonicalized pages must be very close to the same content, it sounds like that won't work either. Thank you for your thoughts.

[haroldcrow]

Again, i enjoyed this video, very clear. This is a topic hard to explain and understand.