What is Canonical URL?

The preferred URL for a page, declared with link rel="canonical".

Canonicals consolidate duplicate URLs (tracking parameters, http/https, trailing slashes) so ranking signals go to one page.

Related terms

• XML sitemap: A file listing a site's URLs so search engines can discover them.
• hreflang: Annotations that tell search engines which language or region each page version targets.
• Open Graph: Meta tags (og:title, og:image…) that control how links look when shared.