You’ve probably come across a Canonical URL in web development, especially in the SEO world.
Imagine you have the same content accessible through multiple URLs. This can confuse search engines like Google, making them unsure of which URL represents the original content. It’s kind of like having several paths to the same destination.
A Canonical URL helps solve this by telling search engines, “Hey, this is the main URL for this content, so please consider all the others as duplicates.” It’s kind of like a VIP pass for a specific URL.
You can set this up in the HTML header with a link element like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/your-vip-url" />
This can help improve your website’s ranking by ensuring that search engines are indexing the right version of a page. In the world of WordPress development, you might find plugins that can manage this for you, making the whole process a lot easier.