In a Google Search Central video Google’s Gary Illyes explained part of webpage indexing that involves selecting canonicals, explaining what a canonical means to Google, a thumbnail explanation of webpage signals, he mentions the centerpiece of a page and tells what it does with the duplicates which implies a new way of thinking about them.
What Is A Canonical Webpage?
There are several ways of considering the what canonical means, the publisher and the SEO’s viewpoint from our side of the search box and what canonical means from Google’s side.
Publishers identify what they feel is the “original” webpage and SEOs conception of canonicals is about choosing the “strongest” version of a webpage for ranking purposes.
Canonicalization for Google is an entirely different thing from what publishers and SEOs think it is so it’s good to hear it from a Googler like Gary Illyes.
Google’s official documentation about canonicalization uses the word deduplication to reference the process of choosing a canonical and lists five typical reasons for why a site might have duplicate pages.
Five Reasons For Duplicate Pages
- “Region variants: for example, a piece of content for the USA and the UK, accessible from different URLs, but essentially the same content in the same language
- Device variants: for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version
- Protocol variants: for example, the HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site
- Site functions: for example, the results of sorting and filtering functions of a category page
- Accidental variants: for example, the demo version of the site is accidentally left accessible to crawlers”
Canonicals can be considered in three different ways and there are at least five reasons for duplicate pages.
Gary describes one more way to think of canonicals.
Signals Are Used For Choosing Canonicals
Ilyes shares one more definition of a canonical, this time from the indexing point of view, and talks about the signals that are used for selecting canonicals.
Gary explains: