What is a canonical URL | MSP Marketing Edge Knowledge Base

A canonical URL is a way of telling Google that your page should be treated as an authorised duplicate of the original post. Using one will avoid penalties from google for duplicate content.

We publish the weekly blog content on our blog site Your Tech Updates, which is indexed by Google.

When you add the blog to your site, if you have not altered the text then you must add a canonical URL.

This is what it looks like:

The link rel="canonical" bit tells Google what the link is.

And the bit with the link href="blogpostlink" tells Google where the original content was published.

There are some very indepth explanations of this at Moz.com, ahrefs, and Shout Me Loud.

How do I add the rel canonical tag to my website?

In WordPress, this is easily done using the Yoast SEO plugin.

Here's how to do it in Wix.

For other sites, you just need to add the code to the <head> section of the page