What is canonical url exactly?how it helps in SEO?

Google can explain...

A canonical URL enables you to tell search engines that specific similar URLs are really one and the same.

Sometimes you have products or content that is obtainable under multiple URLs, or even on multiple websites. Utilizing a canonical URL these can exist without harming your rankings.

Canonical URL is Original Version of two similar kinds of URLs or two URLs with similar content.

Canonicalization is the method used to pick the best URL of similar kind of URL.

Let me explain, what is actually canonical URL means,

when you search http://www.tutoroftech.com in the browser, http://tutoroftech.com is also working with the same address.

Are both URL's same?

Of course same, but for Google bot has some difference.

Similarly, https://www.tutoroftech.com and https://tutoroftech.com are same.

The problem is if you do not tell all the URL's belong the one website then Google treat your website content is duplicate. Which is very harmful to your website.

Using it well improves a site's SEO. The idea is simple, if you have several similar versions of the same content, you pick one "canonical" version and point the search engines at that. This solves the duplicate content problem where search engines don't know which version of the content to show.

Hope to make it sense. Yet, you need further understanding please do not hesitate to respond.

If you have a single page with different urls or different pages with same content, google take this as duplication and it will affect your ranking. In order to avoid that, you have to tell url which page is the original one or which page you want to indexed by google using the canonical tag.

A Canonical tag allows Google and other search engines to understand which page is the original when compared to other similar pages.

Uses: Anytime you have pages that are similar to one another, and you select one of those pages to carry a canonical tag it will improve the overall result of your SEO strategies.

Hi Pavanear2,

If you have a single page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often.

If you don't explicitly tell Google which URL is canonical, Google will make the choice for you, or might consider them both of equal weight, which might lead to unwanted behavior.

Hope that helps,

Best,

Erik