Duplicate content, the great adversary to be faced in order to avoid being penalized by Google. In the manual of correct SEO , having similar links that stumble upon each other until they reach the main search results is one of the most common and harmful errors in web positioning. Therefore, it is essential to use the Canonical tag in PrestaShop to avoid duplicate content.
If your PrestaShop store has become a multiplier of similar URLs and you don't know how to attract the attention of search engines, don't panic, there is a definitive solution and in this post we are going to learn about it in depth.
What is Canonical rel?
Back in 2009 (it's been a while since then) MSN, Yahoo! and the giant Google decided to present the answer to put an end to duplicate content in their searches: the Canonical tag .
Since its launch, this useful tool has helped Google locate the page that best defines our website to respond to searches, that is, it has served as a direct link to our reference page, the canonical one. And how do we tell search engines that this or that page is the one we prefer? Very simple, through its HTML tagging.
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Thanks to this tag (placed in the section
from the HTML code) we manage to place the "offers" category of our digital store as the visible face and in the process we make life easier for Google, which always benefits us.Pagination, differences with rel="next" and rel="prev"
Ok, the canonical URL determines the page that represents all the others in the eyes of search engines, but what about the content that is spread across different pages? Well, first of all, we would be talking about content that is completely different from the Canonical URL.
To indicate the relationship between the URLs of the items in a paginated series, we will include the rel="next" and rel="prev" markup tags on the pages in the series, informing Google to process them as a sequence (page 1, page 2,...) and direct users to the first one.
Accurately indexing the content of your digital store is possible and effective thanks to canonical tags and rel="next" and rel="prev".
Canonical Tag in PrestaShop 1.6
As you can see, this feature is very useful when our PrestaShop store has a large catalogue and very similar URLs appear due to the combinations of our products. If we sell trousers, we could multiply similar links depending on their size, colour or material.
There are many solutions, but through the Canonical URL Module to Avoid Duplicate Content created by Línea Gráfica you will help your store's SEO positioning in the simplest way possible. This effective add-on for PrestaShop automatically adds a canonical URL to all product, category, CMS, manufacturer and supplier pages to focus the work of search engines.
And why is this tag important in PrestaShop? When we go to a category in our digital store and we have several pages, the content is almost identical: same URL, same variables and even same layout. If Google indexes this duplicate content, it penalizes us, so the ideal thing is to recommend that it focus on other, more representative links .
This problem, which can be quickly solved, usually occurs in pagination and in the faceted navigation of our PrestaShop store. It would be enough to use canonical URLs to suggest to Google that "X" keyword is related to "X" page of the store.
Any questions to resolve?
Please use the comments box to share your experience in detail. At Línea Gráfica we are experts in digital marketing and PrestaShop Platinum Partners, so if after what we have said you need personalized advice, just contact us.
