A Canonical URL is the preferred version of a webpage that website owners specify to search engines in order to prevent duplicate content concerns. Multiple URLs leading to the same or similar content on a website might confuse search engines and damage search rankings in some situations.
Website owners provide a Canonical URL to tell search engines which version of the page they consider the primary or original source of content. The signals are then consolidated by search engines for ranking reasons, with the value of any duplicate copies attributed to the given Canonical URL. This helps to avoid content duplication penalties and guarantees that search engines deliver traffic to the proper version of the webpage, resulting in enhanced SEO performance and user experience. Canonical URLs are critical to a website’s integrity and ranking potential in search engine results.