Why Are Canonical Tags Essential for Magento 2 eCommerce Stores?

Competition in the eCommerce industry is at an all-time high, making it challenging for merchants to stay relevant. Despite advancements in marketing tools, the cost of customer acquisition keeps increasing. The reason is that the consumer has a lot more choice than before. Even if they wish to order a charging cable for their phone, they can do so from any corner of the world without any hassle. So, merchants are not just competition with the local stores, but also those based abroad.

This makes ensuring search engine visibility even more important. We all know that search engine optimisation (SEO) is the most effective way to improve search visibility. After all, SEO increases the quality and quantity of organic traffic to a website. Magento 2 is one of the most powerful and widely used eCommerce platforms. It offers a wide range of SEO features, including the ability to add canonical tags in Magneto 2. Most merchants often overlook canonical tags, failing to realise its importance.

However, what merchants need to understand is that canonical tags are critical to SEO strategy’s success. These tags essentially tell the web crawler the preferred version of a webpage, thereby boosting its ranking in the search engine results pages. In this article, we will discuss the importance of canonical tags for Magento 2 eCommerce stores. Before we move forward, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of canonical tags.

What Are Magento 2 Canonical Tags?

In the simplest of terms, the canonical tag (also known as a rel="canonical" tag) is an HTML element that tells the web crawler the preferred or master version of a webpage. Suppose there are multiple pages leading to the same product, the canonical tag will inform the search engine which webpage to prefer over the others. The canonical tag is most useful to avoid issues associated with duplicate content.

Instead of indexing every page with similar content, the search engine only indexes the preferred one. Let’s understand this point with the help of an example. Consider the following three URLs:

www.example.com/productabc
www.example.com/category1/productabc
www.example.com/filterxyz/productabc

Now, all three URLs are pointing to the same product i.e. ‘product abc’. Without a conical tag, a search engine will treat all three URLs separately. Since the content is the same, it may mark the pages as spam, thereby downgrading their rankings in the search engine results page. There’s also a possibility that the webpage may be deindexed altogether. All these scenarios will hurt your store’s search engine visibility. Canonical tags help a search engine understand which page to rank.

This example only provides a brief overview of the importance of canonical tags. So, keep reading below to know more about why canonical tags are necessary.

Why Are Canonical Tags Important for Magento 2 eCommerce Stores?

1. Prevent Duplicate Content Issues

   We did talk about content duplication, but we did not go into the reasons behind it. Content duplication in Magento 2 and other eCommerce platforms are quite common. The common most reasons for content duplication are product sorting, filtering, pagination, and session IDs. For example, the same product may appear multiple times due to the selected filters or categories. Now, without a canonical tag, the search engine has no way of knowing which page to rank.

   If it focuses on all pages, it offsets the hard work of your SEO strategy. You may be trying to get a specific page ranked on Google, but the search engine keeps indexing the other pages too. Even your users may find coming across multiple URLs quite frustrating and confusing. They may not know which link to click, forcing them to abandon your store in favour of one which only displays the most relevant webpage. Thus, canonical tags are must to avoid issues related to content duplication.

2. Optimize Crawl Budget

   If you have 1000s of webpages, it is impossible for a web crawler to crawl and index all of them. The reason is that the crawler has a limited crawl budget. In other words, they can only crawl a certain number of pages in a specific time. Suppose your store has no canonical tags. It means that there would be hundreds of pages pointing to the same webpage or CMS page. What happens is that the web crawler may fail to crawl the most important pages as the budget is wasted on duplicate pages.

   Therefore, it is imperative that Magento 2 store owners learn how to manage the crawl budget effectively. This can only be done if they know how to configure the canonical tags. By indicating the preferred version of a webpage to the search engine, the crawler will ignore the other pages. It ensures that the crawler remains focused only on the most important pages. Ultimately, this will lead to better rankings and an increase in the store’s organic traffic.

3. Enhance Product Page SEO

   The whole point of an eCommerce store is to sell products. If you have multiple pages for the same product appearing on the search engine, it will impact their visibility. The reason is that the SEO authority is divided between the pages. This prevents your product pages from ranking on a prominent position. Research shows that most users only click the first three or five links. If your product page is lower, it will not generate any meaningful sales.

4. Improve Link Equity

   The link equity is the value of a webpage generated via backlinks. If you have a high number of quality backlinks referring to a product page, it has a much higher probability of ranking on top of search engine results pages. However, if you have multiple versions of a webpage, the link equity is divided among the various webpages. Thus, the visibility will decrease. Canonical tags help avoid this issue by indicating which webpage to consolidate the link equity.

5. Facilitate Better User Experience

   Lastly, canonical tags improve the user experience. By adding the canonical tags, the users will likely find the correct version of a product page. This version is properly optimised not just from the content perspective, but also the performance. It means that it will load faster than others. A better user experience will lead to increase in sales and compel the user to return for more.

Final Thoughts on Importance of Canonical Tags

In conclusion, canonical tags are importance to avoid content duplication issues, consolidate link equity, optimise the crawl budget, enhance the user experience, and more. If you require help with canonical tags, check out our Magento 2 Canonical URLs Extension. This extension offers a coding-free way to add canonical tags. At the same time, it offers much more advanced options compared to Magento’s in-built features.