Manage Canonical Links with Yoast
Understanding canonical links with yoast
Search engines like Google sometimes ping content as ‘Duplicate content’ if they appear in multiple locations (URLs) on the web. This confuses Google as they cannot determine which is the source content to rank in search results. This can harm your SEO and page rank and only gets worse as more and more people link to another source.
To avoid duplicate content, we use Yoast SEO to create canonical links and avoid keyword cannibalization. Canonical URL tags help search engines and social media platforms to help identify the ‘original’ version of any page on your website. Yoast has a built-in feature that allows users to easily set up these tags without the need for development, and it is on the content creator/publisher to set up the canonical links.
Example of a canonical link:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/” />
Benefits of canonical URLS
- Prevents duplicate content pings
- Consolidates link value
- Prevents internal competition
- Improves search results rankings
- Consolidates social shares
How to set up canonical URL tags with Yoast
- Go to your desired page and navigate to ‘Advanced’ in the Yoast SEO sidebar
- Enter the full canonical URL including https:// and www.
- Click ‘Update’ to save your changes
🔎 Troubleshooting: If you don’t see a canonical tag in your code after saving, check to see if the page has a ‘noindex’ tag. If it does, mark the page as ‘index’ in your Advanced SEO settings.