PROPER USE OF REL=CANONICAL – GOOGLE RANKING FACTOR?

Google says: “Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines your about preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It’s supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you’d like displayed in search results. However, rel=canonical can be a bit tricky because it’s not very obvious when there’s a misconfiguration.”

Google doesn’t like to show duplicate content in their search results, so Google will instead choose one URL and omit the others. This is referred to as the canonical URL.

Google’s John Mueller addressed the topic of canonicals and search rankings in one of his weekly SEO Q&A sessions.

“In general, I’d recommend using a rel=”canonical” for duplicate content rather than a noindex. With a noindex, you’re telling us this page should not be indexed at all.

With a canonical, you’re telling us this page is essentially the same as this other page I have, and that helps us because then we can take all of the signals that we have for both of these pages and combine them into one.

Whereas if you just have a noindex, or if you block it with robots.txt, then the signals that are associated with that page that’s blocked or has a noindex on it are lost, they’re dropped.”

This confirms that Google is capable of combining ranking signals from duplicate content into one canonical URL with the rel=”canonical” HTML tag.

However, even when the rel=”canonical” tag is used correctly, Google may still choose to ignore it and pick its own canonical URL to show in search results instead.