Member-only story
SEO and canonical links
In the process of moving to hexo and off of Medium I ended up doing a bit of research into SEO and canonical links. Luckily this research came just in time for assisting a fellow blogger who had similar questions, albeit for a different reason; his content was being copied without correct canonical attribution! :O
A Canonical link is used when similar content exists in “more than one place” — be it in the same website, or somewhere across the internet. The canonical link is used in order to tell search engines that “this content is duplicated from somewhere, and this somewhere is the original source”. It’s important to use canonical links for content that exists in multiple places, as it benefits your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in that you aren’t punished for, or competing with, your own content hosted in multiple places. SEO is important as it helps drive traffic to your site.
It was stated above that you can use canonical links as to not compete with your own content hosted in multiple places — and that’s the biggest reason I’m doing it. When not using canonical links, your search engine relevance can take a hit as there is “duplicate content” out there, potentially hurting all occurences of said duplicate content from a search engine perspective. With a canonical link, it is known that it’s not duplicate content, it’s just hosted in multiple places, and the search…