Websites and hosting
Canonical URL
A tag telling search engines which address is the real one for a page, when the same content can be reached at several addresses.
What canonical URL means in practice
The same page routinely exists at more than one address: with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters attached, on both the www and bare domain. Left alone, search engines have to guess which to index, and the ranking signals get divided between them.
A canonical tag settles it. The usual arrangement is that every page names itself, which sounds redundant and is not: it means any variant that appears later inherits the right answer automatically. The failure mode worth knowing about is a canonical built from the current request rather than from a fixed domain, which is how a staging site ends up telling Google that the staging address is the real one.
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