How and Why to Make Canonical Blog Posts

What is a canonical blog post?

You may have heard talk of canonical blog posts here and then when learning about SEO content strategy. But what is it? What makes a post canonical vs. not canonical?

A canonical post is a post references the main or primary version when you have one post published in multiple places. If there are duplicate or similar versions of one pst that you've posted on more than one website, you should indicate that only one is canonical. When you do this, you're communicating to search engines that this is the URL they should index. As a result, the search engine will ignore the other versions and not index them for searches.

Why would you use a canonical blog post?

There is one primary reason to use canonical blog posts in your SEO content strategy: Google does not like duplicate content.

If you write one post and you think that it would make sense to publish it in more than one place, that's fine. You may have different audiences that visit different sites. And your post or content could be useful to those different audiences. Instead of choosing one place to publish, you can post it on more than one site.

But to Google, that could look like you're just jamming as much content into as many places as possible. Google does not want to show people the same piece of content that leads to multiple places, since that could be considered "cheating." And Google can penalize you for attempting to index duplicate content.

Instead, using canonical URLs makes it clear to google that one post location is best for indexing and showing searchers. It will ignore the other posts. That way those audiences who organically find that content can still enjoy it. But only one version is being used for searches.

So to sum up, you may use a canonical tag to:

1. Tell a search engine which URL is the main or original version.
2. Avoid Google punishing you for duplicate content.
3. Improve rankings by avoiding duplicate content issues.
4. Provide additional audiences with your content.

How to make a blog post canonical?

There are two ways to make a blog post canonical. You can use a canonical tag. Or if you're using WordPress, you can use a plugin.

Code

If you're comfortable writing or editing HTML for your site pages, use the canonical tag. Add:

(<link rel="canonical">)

To your pages < head > tag. Add this to all the pages that have this duplicate content. And where it says "canonical" add the canonical URL between the parentheses. This will tell the search engines who land on and try to index this page that either this page is the right or canonical one... or it will tell the search engine that this page is NOT canonical and instead leads it to the canonical version.

Plugin

If you're using WordPress and you're focused on SEO, you should be using the Yoast SEO plugin. If you are, you should be able to utilize a built-in setting to determine which pages and posts are canonical. Here's how.

1. Go to the edit screen for the page or post.
2. Scroll down until you find the Yoast SEO section.
3. Find the Advanced tab and open it.
4. If this is the canonical version, select YES where it asks "Allow search engines to show this content in search results"
5. If this is NOT the canonical veersion, change this to NO.
6. For both versions, add the canonical URL into the corresponding field.

Use this video walk through to see how to do this! https://www.loom.com/share/4e90a8b1924e4b9088ccb45fb9399f3e?sid=ea281798-5768-488a-bf0e-3b48c607bb86