canonical tag

A canonical tag is placed in the source code of a page and given a URL. Search engines recognize this URL as the so-called canonical URL. For the Bot, this means the page with the canonical tag is not the actual page but refers to the canonical URL. This prevents duplicate content.

Typical cases are addresses with campaign parameters attached, filter and sorting views in online shops, or the same content under several Permalinks.

It is common practice to set a canonical tag on every page that points to the page itself. However, the tag remains a hint: Google may ignore it if other signals contradict it. If you want to keep a page out of the index reliably, use NoIndex.

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