Canonical URL usage

#253297
  • Resolved Zaphire
    Rank Math free

    Under the Canonical URL in Rankmath it is written:
    The canonical URL informs search crawlers which page is the main page if you have double content

    But i was told by someone from Rankmath the following:
    ‘If you’re going to set the canonical URL manually, its purpose would be to inform Google that it is a duplicate page, and should not be indexed’

    Which is the right one, am i missing something?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Good question. I was always told you shouldn’t mix noindex and rel=canonical. So canonical is used if you have a page with duplicate content. For example, if you have two articles about insurance but you don’t want article B to eat article A’s link juice. So you set B as canonical and point back to A, telling Google to show A but not B. I’m curious to hear what RM has to say.

    Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Rank Math today.

    What Michael said in the previous reply is correct and you shouldn’t mix the noindex tag with the canonical URL.

    That’s why in our plugin any pages that have that tag don’t have the canonical URL applied to them.

    R​​​​​​egarding the usage of the canonical URL, which is used to consolidate duplicate content on your website. You can read more about this and the reasons to use the canonical URL here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls

    Hope this helps clarify your doubts.

    Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.

    Zaphire says, should we edit the canonical url box according to the url of our article in the advanced options?
    Or should we leave the canonical url box blank? Does rank math automatically make this adjustment?

    Anas
    Rank Math business

    Hello,

    Rank Math by default adds a self-referring canonical URL to the pages that are set to index. You can leave the textbox empty.

    Hope this helps.

    Thank you.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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