Do you have a single page accessed by multiple URLs? In such a case, Google tries to determine the best URL for your content.
Thus, if you have a web page that can be reached by using more than one URL, you can use the Google-selected canonical URL to display in search and to use in other ways.
Canonical URL is one of the many items that site owners and web developers need to be aware of, as it lets you tell search engines that certain URLs are actually the same. This solves the duplicate content problem where search engines don’t know which version of the content to show in their results.
Google stated, “If you suspect we’ve not selected the best canonical URL for your content, you can check by entering your page’s address into the URL Inspection tool within Search Console and select the best canonical URL.”
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
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.
So, to specify which URL that you want people to see in search results, you can follow the steps on our duplicate URLs help page on how to suggest a preferred choice for consideration.
“If you search using the site: or inurl: commands, you will be shown the domain you specified in those, even if these aren’t the Google-selected canonical.” says Google.
Google has also changed the URL Inspection tool and are also retiring the info: command, so that it will display any Google-selected canonical for a URL, not just those for properties you manage in Search Console, but also to provide a more comprehensive solution to help publishers with URLs.
