if you failed the canonical tags test don't panic
but this does require a bit of explanation
if you have no idea what these are
failing this test means most likely that you've got
some similar content
like maybe some similar pages that you're split testing
different URLs for different variations
in a similar product
or you've got the same content on
multiple URLs and so on
and the search engines are indexing them as such as different pages
generally this is not a good thing since
duplicate content hurts your SEO efforts
generally you want to rank as high as possible
for certain content and keywords
not necessarily get all of your content ranked
so in some cases it's a much better idea to have
this same or similar content count as the same page
as far as these search engines are concerned
even if the URLs for these pages are different
so wait what how can we do that
that's exactly what canonical tags are all about
for instance let's say I've got my main index page here
this is my quote-unquote real website
with almost all of my advertisement efforts
and almost all of my traffic
coming from major cities in the US
things are going very well with business
I'm happy yay for me
but in trying to expand my online business and reach new markets
I'm also doing some split testing in a few major Canadian cities
now the ads I run are one thing
basically carbon copies of my
ads for the US market this isn't an issue
but I've got them hyperlinked to a slightly different URL
99% the same as my index page
only this one is slightly catering to the Canadian market
really just a word or two is changed in the text
I've got the good old maple leaf flag instead of Stars and Stripes
and that's it
very very minor changes
that this is exactly what I want in terms of marketing
but the problem is that Google and other search engines are likely
going to nail me for having duplicate content here
they're gonna say hey wait
a minute this page and this page are practically identical
look at all the similarities here
so what's with the two URLs
this dude here is trying to trick us
into thinking he's got more content that he actually has
he's keyword stuffing he's trying to rig the page
signal game we're on to him
so let's dock him some points
well booooo-whoo for me I'm doing nothing wrong here
but I'm getting punished for it
or another example let's say that
I sell custom designed t-shirts on my ecommerce site
I've got hundreds of the things and customers
can not only choose the design they want
but obviously the size and even the shirt style
so I've got hundreds of individual pages
with absolute heaps of the same content
the text descriptions the buttons and so on
each with a unique URL
and to make matters potentially worse for my SEO
yet better for navigation purposes
I've also got a lot of this content duplicated in different categories
like shirts for men and women for instance
so that's double the amount of URLs
yikes
or same goes if I've got a blog that I've been writing for years
lots of terrific content hundreds of articles thousands of blog posts
conveniently divided across multiple pages
to help my users navigate through this
massive library of content that I have
divided content like this is known as pagination
now in this case I'd like my blog to rank as high as possible
but I'm certainly not trying to land all 326 of my URLs
in the top 10 of the SERPs
I'm just trying to land my homepage
so in all of these three scenarios I want to do two simple things
one I want to avoid being penalized for duplicate content
and two I want to tell the
search engines to please spend all the link juice
that I'm squeezing out of my site
and apply it to a certain page
and voila that's exactly when canonical tags come to the rescue
it's a way to tell the search engines
that everything's aboveboard here
can you please not treat this as duplicate content
but instead can we take any positive PageRank signal
that this page is getting
and apply it to this page
so let's look at a few ways to harness the power of the canonical tag
one option is to add this tag inside the header of each page
that you want the search engines to look past so to speak
in this context that we've been talking about
and point that tag to the page that you do want ranked
now of course if you have thousands of pages that you want to leave behind in the SERPs
then this could get pretty tedious
but it's a solid way to guarantee that you're not going
to get penalized for duplicate content
or other issues on pages that carry this tag in the head
that is HTML pages
this method is not going to work for things like PDF files
in those cases and another method we can use
is to employ the canonical tag and an HTTP header
or your page response
since files like PDFs don't have HTML headers
we can't very well add canonical links in there
so in those cases we'll need to implement them another way
in those cases we can add a snippet of code to our ht access file
if we're using PHP
then we can add a header like this before any HTML output
which will add the canonical link before it gets sent
or if you're using asp.net
you can add a header like this
when you're done just be sure to submit your URL
to Google search console
so that it will get your canonical URL crawled
and one last method to add the canonical tag is through your sitemap
just specify your canonical URLs there
save
and submit that new sitemap to
Google and other search engine consoles
but for the record search engines will
still have to crawl the content and understand
what duplicate content might be there
and this is generally the weakest approach
in terms of getting the
search engines to understand what you're doing
the other methods that we've just covered or better
but that said the sitemap method isn't completely ineffective
and it's obviously much much easier
especially if you've got this gigantic site with lots of pages
in that case then about 30 seconds of work and
boom you're done
compared to editing all those different pages and
adding tags in the head section
just saying might be a good enough option depending on your circumstances
feel free to check out our other videos so you can keep fine-tuning
and getting the most out of your SEO
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