Google’s Gary Illyes recently shed some light on how the search giant chooses canonical webpages. It’s certainly a complex process, and one that savvy SEO practitioners should understand. The selection mechanism isn’t arbitrary; it follows a particular algorithm which determines the visibility of a website in search results.
Understanding duplicate pages is crucial. Publishers often view the first page as canonical, while SEO experts would consider the most optimized version as canonical. The key takeaway is to recognize and define a canonical webpage to avoid content duplication issues, optimising visibility and organic traffic.
Google, however, takes a different approach. It uses ‘deduplication’ to choose canonical webpages, considering variables such as regional or device variations, protocol variations, site features, and accidental duplications.
Decoding Google’s canonical webpage selection process
The goal is to index only the most relevant and useful version of a webpage, improving search engine performance.
Google’s role in indexing is to detect duplicated pages and decide which version to keep as the canonical version, essentially, the one that’s the best representation of its group. This relies on a careful evaluation of the authenticity and originality of each webpage.
A technique called duplicate clustering aids Google in this process. It groups similar content pages together, analyzing the main content of each page. This allows Google to serve diverse and relevant search results.
When planning webpages, it’s important to remember that less is more. An uncluttered webpage delivering clear, precise content is favored by search engines. Attention should be given to publicly accessible content, as algorithms tend to prioritize these pages in search results. This can significantly boost a webpage’s chances of being chosen as canonical by Google, improving visibility and traffic.
