What is Canonical URL?
Hi Friends,
A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues in search engine optimization by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page. It is described in RFC 6596, which went live in April 2012.
Duplicate content issues arise when you have similar pages. You can solve this by selecting a URL that is called the canonical URL.
Canonical URLs relate to the concept of selecting the best URL for the web pages that the visitors want to see. Also, known as canonical tags, these URLs help in content syndication when multiple versions of a same page become available over the Internet. Thus, it is used to resolve issues related to content duplication.
A canonical URL refers to an HTML link element, with the attribute of rel="canonical" , found in the <head> element of your webpage. It specifies to search engines your preferred URL. ... In other words, if you have a web page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content
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.
Canonical URL is the search engine friendly url that we want to treat as authoritative one by the search engines and it helps to avoid the duplication content and gives clarity to the search engines
From an SEO point of view here is the definition of a canonical URL: Canonical URL: the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see. Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage