Find your pages with canonical tags

Canonical tags are used for indicating if a page is similar to another page. When adding a canonical tag to a page, you will need to add another page that is then registered as the origin of the content of your page.  This is a good way of dealing with duplicate content on your pages.

Google does not want to feature duplicate content on the same search result, which is why having duplicate content can result in a poorer performance for your pages. This is where canonical tags can help, by informing Google of the "best" version of your content.

If you have duplicate content on your page, it can damage your SEO, but canonical tags can allow you to mitigate this, by telling Google which page to prioritize.

When you have duplicate content across multiple pages, it raises multiple problems for Google, like which page it should index, which page should rank for relevant searches, which pages should be crawled, etc.

Normally Google will pick the page it finds to be the best version by itself, but this doesn't always give the best result. With canonical tags, you will however be able to decide which page Google should treat as the best version of the site, so you will know what pages to prioritize.

If you don't use canonical tags it can affect how your pages with duplicate content are registered on Google. If you have multiple pages with duplicate content, then Google will only rank one of them on relevant keywords. Normally Google will just choose the page it thinks is the best and rank that one, but with canonical tags you can decide which page is going to rank on Google.

Another benefit of canonical tags, is that it helps Google crawl your pages more efficiently. If Google know which pages contain duplicate content it will help their crawlers know which pages to invest their effort into crawling.

Google does not like duplicate content and will always try it's best to have relatively varied and unique content on it's page. This also means that Google will try it's best to not have duplicate content or even multiple pages from the same website ranking on the same keyword. Because of this having duplicate content ranking is extremely unlikely to happen.

You can see which page a canonical tag leads to, but it might require a bit of technical knowledge. If you are using the canonical tag scanner in Morningscore, you can click on the link written in purple to go to the page which contains the canonical tag.

Once you are on the page containing the canonical tag you can right-click on the page and choose the "Inspect" option from the drop down menu. When you click on this option you will see the page's source code, which can seem a bit intimidating at first, but don't worry you won't have to go through it manually.

If you click on the Control and F key at the same time (Command and F if you are on Mac), you can search in the page's source code. Type in "canonical" and you should find the following text:

<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://example.com/page/” />

The page the canonical tag leads to can be found where “https://example.com/page/” is located in the above example.

Morningscore's canonical tag scanner looks through the source code on your website and searches for a canonical tag. If a canonical tag is found, then the page is added to the list of pages with canonical tags on Morningscore.

Morningscore's canonical tag scanner is located in the health section of Morningscore, meaning it's updated along with the rest of the health tools.

You can choose schedule regular health scans for your site, but you can also choose to scan your site manually. Each time you scan your website's health will also result in an update of the canonical tag scanner.