Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties with Canonical URLs in Blog Posts

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If you’re worried about duplicate content penalties on your website because your posts are available from variety of URLs of different forms, be sure to indicate your canonical URLs in blog posts. Doing so makes it so that the search engines can tell what you deem to be the original/main version of a document to be listed in search results.

This means that you may want to make sure the one selected is the cleanest URL or most straightforward looking link.

SEO plugins typically have an option for setting this.

Mark Canonical URLs with Rank Math plugin

From within the Post/Page:

  1. Select Options
  2. Click “Math Rank” plugin. This is where you normally look at what else you may be able to improve on a post.
  3. Select the wrench icon for “Advanced”
  4. Fill in the Canonical URL
  5. Click Publish and confirm the Publish.

This will essentially place a link on your page (in the html ‘under the covers’) that looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://exampleurl.com/page-slug" />

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