Local search. Reviewed October 29, 2026
Canonical URL
Also called: Canonical tag, rel=canonical
A canonical URL is the tag that tells Google which version of a page is the original when the same content can be reached at more than one address.
In practice
The usual duplicates are www and non-www, http and https, a trailing slash and none, and links with tracking parameters on the end. Without a canonical, Google picks one itself and may split credit between them.
Every page should declare its own clean address as canonical, and the site should redirect the other variants to it.
Related terms
- 301 redirectA 301 redirect permanently sends visitors and search engines from an old web address to a new one and passes most of the old page's ranking value along with them.
- IndexingIndexing is Google adding a page to its database so it can appear in search results, and a page that has been crawled but not indexed cannot rank for anything.
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