A redirected URL is not accessible for visitors or search engines. When search bot crawls your website and finds similar data on multiple URLs, it doesn’t know how to treat your content. A canonical URL can be seen in the source of a webpage, by searching for rel="canonical". Canonical URLs help search engines consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) into a single, authoritative URL. Edit on GitHub. … It is an element only the search engines see, your users won’t be affected by it. Canonical and non-canonical URLs or pages have same content. Do link to the canonical URL rather than a duplicate URL, when linking within your site. A canonical URL is used when all versions of the page should be accessible to visitors but only one of them should be indexed by search engines.

A 301 redirect forwards both visitors and search engines from one URL to another URL. In most cases, bot trusts the clues you give it (unless you trying to manipulate search results).

Additionally if you syndicate your content for publication on other domains, canonical URLs help to consolidate page ranking to your preferred URL. Canonical URLs are important, as they tell search engines what the “original” URL was for a specific page or blog post. An example of a canonical in the source code of one of our posts: it refers to the original version of the article that was first published on another website.

People might know it has to do with SEO, but aren’t quite sure where or when to apply it.

Gatsby has a simple plugin named gatsby-plugin-canonical-urls which sets the base URL used for canonical URLs for your website. In WordPress in particular (versus an HTML site), it can be hard to manually use a Canonical URL …

A canonical URL and a 301 redirect are two entirely different means to an end. The Canonical URL is a mystery to many people, and can be mistaken in its usage for things like a 301 redirect. How to detect a canonical URL. Like on one non-canonical URL you are showing order records sorted by date and on another non-canonical URL you are showing same records sorted by price.