What Is a Canonical URL in SEO and When Should You Set It?
How Google picks one URL from a set of duplicates, and how to influence it.
Aditya Challa1 min read
Summary
A canonical URL is the version of a page that Google picks as the representative one when several URLs show the same or very similar content. You can suggest it with rel="canonical", redirects or your sitemap, but Google treats these as signals, not commands.
Ways to specify a canonical
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/page" />in the page head- A
rel="canonical"HTTP header (useful for PDFs) - 301 redirects from duplicates
- Listing only canonical URLs in your sitemap
Common duplicate sources
HTTP vs HTTPS, www vs non-www, tracking parameters, and printer or sorted versions of the same page.
Mistakes to avoid
Do not use robots.txt or the Removals tool for canonicalization, and do not point canonicals at pages that redirect or return errors.
Related: /blog/how-do-i-submit-a-sitemap-to-google
Related: /blog/how-to-remove-a-url-from-google-search
Related: /blog/what-does-crawled-currently-not-indexed-mean
Sources
Lab evidence
What I found running this
Facts in this draft were checked on 12 Oct 2026 against the primary sources listed in the body (official docs, release schedules or Google/YouTube help pages). No benchmarks or timings were run, so the post makes no performance or measurement claims; dates are quoted as published by the maintainers, and any estimate is labelled as such.
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