#SEOProsTribe
First you need to know the history of Canonical Tag
The search engines have been struggling with websites based on poor programming and bad structure for many years.
As a result of this many websites accidentally created duplicated content just because the programmers didn’t know how the search engines was reading the websites…
Therefore Google and the other search engines needed to come up a solution that could show them the original URL. That happened to be the Canonical Tag .
Why is duplicated content bad?
Imagine you go to the library to borrow some cooking books about cupcakes. You borrow 5 books and look forward to read a lot about the different cupcakes. When you get home you open them and realizes that all the books contains the exact same recipes. Well… That was not what you’ve expected and the result would be a very bad experience simply because you borrowed the 5 different books for the reason that you wanted to learn from each book. So next time you would probably find another library where you can find books with unique recipes.
As you might noticed is Google the library… Their most important job is to show the user unique content on the most relevant websites based on the keywords or phrase the user has searched for. Therefore if your website has duplicated content Google will no define it as unique which means that your rankings will get affected negatively.
How do I know if I have duplicated content?
There are so many examples of things than can generate duplicated content without you knowing it, so making a list will make this post never ending.
But…
Everytime you share a page on Facebook you’re risking duplicated content!!!
YES you’ve heard me… but don’t worry I will explain 
Before I go further I want to show you an example:
Here you see a post I’ve shared on the Wix Design Experts Facebook group.
What you see is that I’ve shared the blog posts original URL (the link in the blue box).
What happen when people are clicking on the link is this:
Facebook automatically added “?fbclid=IwAR0qBrTED5D…” after the original URL.
So now there are several variations of the URL but with the exact same content on the page. ANY BELL RINGING?.. That means duplicated content…!
Don’t worry WiX got your back!
If you have a canonical tag on the page you’ll tell Google that your unique content is on the original URL (in this case): https://www.wix.com/experts/home/forum/discussion/huge-seo-step-for-wix-blog. So when Facebook generates a new URL from the original URL, Google still knows that the unique content comes from the original URL and therefore Google wont index the facebook generated URL and then it isn’t duplicated content.
But as I wrote in my last post Huge SEO step for wix blog , WiX are now testing automatically generated canonical tags on wix blog and hopefully it will be fully implemented very soon!
This was an insight in the advanced world of SEO and I really hope that you found it interesting. This post was not ment to scare you away from SEO but instead inspire you to take SEO seriously and to let you know that WiX is working very hard to improve SEO in all their product so we can rock Googles search results with our websites
Thank you for taking the time to read my post <3
Please feel free to leave a comment and share the post with people you like
Are you familiar with SEO?