When you publish a blog post on PhotoBiz, there may be multiple categories or pages that you have your blog posts accessible through. This guide will explain the canonical version for your blog post.
What are Canonical Tags?
Canonical tags are HTML elements that inform search engines about the preferred version of a web page when multiple versions with similar content exist. They help search engines understand which URL should be prioritized in search results, avoiding duplicate content issues that can harm SEO rankings.
Canonical Tags and Blogs
The PhotoBiz blog builder provides you with a preview link in the upper left corner. This URL has a canonical tag that tells Google and other search engines to index this URL.
This will show a URL in the following format:
https://www.yourdomain.com/blog-post/blog-title
Alternate Blog URL
When setting up your blog to display on a webpage using a blog block, such as yourdomain.com/blog, you'll notice that a different URL will appear for the blog. This will be marked as an alternate URL.
This will show a URL in the following format:
https://www.yourdomain.com/pagename/blog/blog-title
Why It Matters
Because search engines only index one version of a URL per page, this often causes an indexing error within Google Search Console under Alternate Page with Proper Canonical Tag.
Simply put, this just means Google will index the URL with the canonical tag instead of the alternate URL. Since the second URL is being marked as an alternate and not a duplicate, there isn't any issue and will not have any negative impact on SEO.
PRO TIP!
When submitting your Sitemap to Google Search Console, make sure to submit your Blog RSS feed as well to ensure the proper version of your blogs are getting indexed.
If you need assistance with this, you can follow the steps in our guide on submitting blogs to Google.
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