Hi Friends,
How to detect a canonical URL?
As a website gets bigger, it's often hard to prevent pages from becoming duplicates or near-duplicates of each other. This can cause duplicate content issues. If you have two similar pages, and they are both eligible to rank for a certain keyphrase, the search engine simply doesn't know which of the two URLs it should send the traffic to. To solve this, you can select a preferred URL, this is what we call the canonical URL.
How to detect a canonical URL
A canonical URL can be seen in the source of a webpage, by searching for rel="canonical". It is an element only the search engines see, your users won't be affected by it.
Canonical is a preferred url for most search engines as they lift up your links & ranking signals for the content available through multiple URL's. Rel canonical url's also resolve duplicate content issues. Rel=canonical usually used to sum up it within the top portion of your HTML
1. In your Search Console homepage, make sure you identify the different versions of your website.
2. Click the version of your site you want.
3. Click the gear icon, then click Site Settings.
4. In the Preferred domain section, choose the site you want to be preferred.