A canonical URL is the rel="canonical" attribute that tells Google which is the "true" version of a page when duplicate versions exist (e.g. with and without www, with and without a trailing slash).
A canonical URL (rel="canonical") is an HTML tag that indicates the preferred version of a page when duplicate content exists across multiple URLs. Example: site.com/article vs. site.com/article/ — the same content. Google initially treats them as 2 separate pages (competing with each other). With <link rel="canonical" href="https://site.com/article/" /> on the /article page, you tell Google: "the true content is at the specified URL, report the traffic and authority there". The canonical is not a redirect — the /article page is still accessible and functional.
Duplicate content splits authority across 2 URLs. With a canonical, you consolidate the signals into a single URL and rank better. It is the difference between DA 20 on 2 pages vs. DA 40 on 1 page.
Source: Google — Canonical URLsTechnical SEO covers the optimizations of your site's infrastructure — crawlability, indexing, loading speed, HTTPS and data structure — that let Google find and understand your pages.
URL structure is how your site's page URLs are organized. Shorter, cleaner and more descriptive URLs rank better and are easier to share.
Duplicate content = the same (or very similar) content on multiple URLs. Google penalizes pages with internal and external duplicate content.
Core Web Vitals are 3 technical Google metrics — LCP, INP and CLS — that measure page user experience and have been official ranking factors since 2021.
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