Canonicals & duplicates

No canonical tag

One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.

How serious: Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
Based on: Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.

What is wrong

A canonical tag is a line of code in the head section of your page that tells search engines which version of a page is the "official" one. Without it, search engines may not know whether a page should rank, or they may treat similar pages as duplicates and split credit between them.

Why it costs you

When search engines see multiple versions of the same content—whether from tracking parameters, mobile variants, or pages you've copied—they have to guess which one matters. Without a canonical tag to settle this, they may index the wrong version, rank none of them well, or waste their crawling effort on pages you never wanted indexed. Your real content gets buried.

How to fix it

Add a canonical tag to the head section of each page template. The tag should point to the page's own URL, or to the preferred version if duplicates exist. It looks like this: `<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/page-name" />`. If your site uses a content management system like WordPress, plugins can add these automatically across all pages at once, so you need only configure it once rather than editing each page by hand.

What the audit tests

Each indexable page has a canonical tag with an address in it

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Other canonicals & duplicates checks

All 136 checks