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Cross Domain Canonicalization

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Le referencing natural, or SEOis a complex and constantly evolving discipline.

To optimise their visibility on search engines such as GoogleThere are many technical and editorial criteria that webmasters need to take into account.

One of the often overlooked aspects of SEO is "Cross Domain Canonicalization".

In this article, we'll look at what this concept means and how to use it to improve our positioning.

What is Cross Domain Canonicalization?

Le Cross Domain Canonicalizationalso known as "cross-domain canonical tag" or simply "canonical tag", is a mechanism that informs search engine spiders that the same page exists under several addresses URL but the content remains identical or similar between them. Using this tag helps to prevent problems of duplicate content (duplicate content) and consolidate the popularity of the pages concerned within the search engine algorithm.

Why use Cross Domain Canonicalization?

There are many reasons why a page may be accessible under several different URLs:

• A site uses an HTTP protocol and HTTPS;
• A site can be accessed with and without the www;
• Marketing campaigns that assign specific parameters to the URL;
• User sessions are stored in the URL address;
• And so on.

However, if search engines crawl these separate addresses as different content, this can lead to duplicate content problems and therefore have a negative impact on SEO. The Canonical tag makes it possible to give robots a single version to index, thus preventing these possible penalties.

10 key points for a successful SEO implementation :

1. Identify the URLs affected by Cross Domain Canonicalization

The first step is to identify all the URLs with identical or similar content. You can use online tools to help you do this, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

2. Choose the canonical URL

Once you have identified the URLs concerned, you need to choose the one that will be considered as the canonicalThis is the official version of the page that you want the search engines to index. This decision should take into account the quality of the content, the popularity (number of backlinks) and the age of each URL.

3. Enter the canonical tag

In the code HTML tag on each non-canonical page, add the  between beacons  and . Replace [URL_CANONIC] with the address of the canonical page you selected earlier.

4. 301 redirects

To reinforce the authority of the canonical URL, it is advisable to set up 301 redirects which will redirect users and search engine spiders to this URL when one of the other addresses is called up.

5. Check consistency between hreflang and canonical tags

If your site is multilingual, make sure that the Hreflang and Canonical are compatible. Pages that have an alternative version in another language must also have a canonical link to the same reference version.

6. HTTPS protocol

If you have set up the HTTPS protocol on your site, make sure that all canonical URLs are in HTTPS, to avoid duplicate content problems linked to two simultaneous versions.

7. Referencing the canonical URL in sitemaps

To facilitate indexing by search engines, don't forget to add the canonical URL address to your sitemap of your website.

8. Track natural referencing performance

Once Cross Domain Canonicalization has been implemented, it is important to monitor changes in the search engine positioning of the pages concerned. To do this, don't hesitate to use tools such as Google Search Console or positioning tracking software.

9. Regularly check canonical and non-canonical URLs

Adding pages, deleting or moving content can lead to canonical link errors. Remember to check regularly that the URLs concerned are still valid and correspond to the desired content.

10. Update the CORS authorisation protocol if necessary

If you work with applications or content from different domains, you may have set up a CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) authorisation protocol. In this case, make sure that Canonical tags are not blocked by this authorisation.

In short, the Cross Domain Canonicalization is a key SEO element for avoiding duplicate content problems and improving search engine positioning.

To do this, you need to identify the URLs concerned, choose the canonical URL, add the Canonical tags in the HTML code as well as 301 redirects and regularly check the effectiveness of this implementation.