Behind the Scenes of Canonicalization: Google’s Complex Balancing Act

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As a website owner or digital marketer, you may think of canonical URLs as just another technical SEO box to tick. However, there’s a fascinating complexity to how Google decides which URL to prioritize when faced with duplicate or near-duplicate pages.

In a recent episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, Allan Scott from Google’s “Dups” team shed some light on the process. He revealed that Google relies on around 40 different signals to determine the canonical URL for a page. While some of these signals are well-documented, others remain part of Google’s secret sauce.

The Art (and Science) of Canonicalization

Duplicate content is a significant challenge for search engines. Imagine crawling the web and finding the same content plastered across different URLs — it’s like sifting through a maze to find the correct exit.

Canonicalization is Google’s solution to this problem, ensuring the search engine identifies a single URL to index and display in search…