To ensure long-term success of your online store, it is imperative to optimise it. This will not only help attract and retain customers, but also improve your store’s organic ranking. Without optimisation, the store’s ranking among the search engine result pages (SERPs) will go down, leading to reduction in organic traffic. Ultimately, the fall in traffic will impact your store’s sales and force you to spend more on paid marketing strategies such as Google Ads.

When it comes to optimisation, store owners have multiple options. For example, uploading images in WebP format, making the website mobile responsiveness, and increasing the loading speed are all part of website optimisation. However, our focus is on canonical URLs, a key part of the search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. In this article, we will discuss everything there is to know about Magento 2 Canonical URL, including how to set it up and related best practices.

What is a Magento 2 Canonical URL?

Suppose you have 3 Magento webpages that have duplicate or highly similar content. As you may know, duplicate content impacts your organic ranking. Search engines may mark the pages as spam and penalise your website. To avoid this, search engines suggest implementing a Magento 2 canonical URL. This URL simply tells the search engine which URL you want to appear in the SERPs. It allows you to retain other webpages with duplicate/highly similar content without fear of any penalty.

Reasons Behind Duplicate Content

Before moving forward, it is pertinent to review the various reasons contributing to duplicate content. They include:

1. Multiple URLs Pointing to the Same Product

It is quite likely that the same product appears despite configuring different sorting options or filters. While the product and its description stay the same, the URL changes. This is one of the most common reasons behind duplicate content.

2. Regional Variants

If your store is serving different geographical locations, you may have set up different webpages for each region. For example, your store is based in France. The target audience is US, UK, and the rest of Europe. It makes no sense to have separate content for UK and US websites as both are English speaking countries. Thus, in this scenario, you will have the same content but for two different webpages.

3. HTTP/HTTPS

Nowadays, it is common for websites to have two variants – one with HTTP and one with HTTPS. For the everyday user, this difference is not noticeable. However, for the search engines, HTTP and HTTPS versions are two different webpages. Therefore, having the same content means duplicate content.

4. Miscellaneous

Other reasons your website may have duplicate or highly similar content is because you forgot to disable theme or test pages before going live.

When is Content Duplication a Problem?

Remember, not all duplicate content is an issue at least in the context of eCommerce. The reason is that despite having different products, the description may be same. If not this, then you may have a text snippet appearing on every or multiple pages. As long as the duplicate content is less than 100 words, you don’t have to worry about a penalty or setting up a canonical URL.

Best Practices for Magento 2 Canonical URL

1. Consistency

The first recommendation is to always use a consistent URL structure across your Magento 2 website. This makes it easier to manage canonical URLs. When creating a URL, don’t forget to include the primary keyword. This will boost your SEO strategy. However, only add the keyword if it appears naturally. Otherwise, it will be a case of keyword stuffing.

2. Don’t Use Robots.txt File for Canonical URL Purposes

Secondly, don’t use a robots.txt file for setting up a canonical URL. The reason is quite simple. The robots.txt file is used for managing crawl directives. It tells the crawler which section of the website to index. It helps locking access to pages that are irrelevant from the user experience or SEO perspective. For example, there’s no point in indexing internal search result pages or admin login page.

3. Use them Carefully

As said earlier, not every duplicate content will lead to a penalty. Only set up the canonical URL when it is clear that the content meets the duplicate/highly similar criterion. Overusing the canonical URLs can confuse web crawlers, making it challenging to block webpages and rank the website.

4. Link to the Canonical URL When Interlinking

When adding internal links or a backlink, always link to the canonical URL. This ensures that the link equity is transferred to the preferred URL. If you add internal or backlinks to multiple pages, the link equity is divided among the pages. It would make it challenging to rank the preferred webpage.

5. Canonicalize the Homepage

The homepage is one webpage that has multiple variations. For example, one will appear with ‘www’, while the other without it. Similarly, you may have a version with a ‘/’ appearing at the end, and one without it. Ensure to add a canonical URL to the homepage and that all links point to the canonicalized version.

6. Monitor Canonical URLs

After adding canonical URLs, monitor their performance. You can use the Google Search Console tool for this purpose or any other SEO tool. It will help you identify if there are any issues with the canonical URLs.

7. Invest in an Extension

One of the top reasons merchants prefer Magento 2 is the customisability. Through third-party extensions, you can add advanced features and more. Speaking of extensions, you can use a Magento 2 Canonical URL extension to manage canonical URLs effectively. These extensions allow you to add canonical URLs to product, category, and CMS pages. Also, you can manage all canonical URLs through a single interface.

Setting up a Canonical URL in Magento 2

• Login to the Magento 2 Admin Panel 🡪 Stores 🡪 Configuration.

• In the Catalog section, select Catalog again to view configuration settings.

• In the Search Engine Optimisation section, go to ‘Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products’. Set the option to ‘Yes’. It will add a canonical tag to all product pages.

To enable canonical URL for category pages, find ‘Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories’ in the Search Engine Optimisation section and follow the same steps as above. Don’t forget to click on ‘Save Config’ and clearing the cache to reflect the changes.

Final Thoughts on Magento 2 Canonical URL

This concludes our article on the best practices for Magento 2 canonical URL and how to configure them. Remember, avoid overusing the canonical URLs. Instead, use them only when you are 100% sure.