Canonical URL
The preferred version of a webpage that tells search engines which URL to index when duplicate or near-duplicate content exists across multiple URLs.
Why It Matters for Your Business
Duplicate content is more common than most business owners realize. Your homepage might be accessible at yourdomain.com, www.yourdomain.com, and yourdomain.com/index.html. That's three versions of the same page competing against each other in Google.
For Space Coast businesses, this problem often shows up with service area pages. A Merritt Island cleaning company with separate pages for "house cleaning Merritt Island" and "home cleaning Merritt Island" is splitting their ranking power between near-identical pages. Canonical tags solve this by pointing Google to the one page that should rank.
How It Works
The canonical tag is a small piece of HTML in your page's head section that tells search engines which URL is the master copy:
A Titusville restaurant with both a /menu page and a /our-menu page showing the same content should set the canonical on /our-menu to point to /menu. Google then consolidates all ranking signals to the preferred URL.
Ask your developer to add self-referencing canonical tags to every page on your site. It takes minutes to implement and prevents a whole category of duplicate content problems before they start.
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