Canonical Tag Check

This tool is used to check if your webpage is using the proper canonical link tag. The canonical URL of a page is often specified in a canonical link element, which can be inserted into the <head> element section of a webpage. Our Canonical tag check is a free online tool to test URL canonicalization in SEO

What is Canonical URL ?

A canonical URL is an address that is chosen as a 'preferred' one for search engine indexation. You may also hear users say 'canonical tag' keeping in mind an HTML attribute, which you apply to website pages to tell search engines where to assign the search value. The canonicalization is necessary for pages with duplicate or very similar content. Thus, you can specify which page is the main.

A website can sometimes contain the same text on different variations of the page. This can be for a number of reasons, sometimes the same article is posted in a different directory on the same website so could have urls like ‘/products/smartphone/specification.html’ and ‘/products/iphone/specification.html’. Other times it could be because the website has aliases, e.g. ‘phonegadgets.co.uk/smartphone/specification.html’ and phonegadgets.com/smartphone/specification.html’.

If your website publishes the same content in different urls, then search engine like Google may not automatically select the correct URL. If Google sees the same content in a different URL, then your site might be downgraded with a duplicate content penalty, or may be judged as less authoritative.

How to use canonical tag in the page ?

In SEO, search bots use H1 to get to know what is website about, and its recommended to have best page keyword in your H1 heading. Also, do not distract search engines by putting multiple H1 on a single page, instead use subheading tags H2-H6 hierarchy for descending subsections. These subheadings tags are far less important than the H1 and are placed mostly for users rather than crawlers.

In the <head> element of your web page, you can add a special html tag that looks a bit like this:

Search engines will then see this link and know that the preferred URL for the page should be the one indicated. Be warned though, if you mistype the URL in the canonical tag, then your page could be excluded from Google.