You might be losing out on some SEO apple juice if you aren't canonicalizing your content.
The article above goes into more depth but here's the gist:
To a search engine, canonicalization means, "Tell me where the OG content is for 'duplicate' (to me) content."
Take the following two URLs:
https://kittenmittens.dev/blog/ultimate-guide-to-cat-opshttps://kittenmittens.dev/blog/ultimate-guide-to-cat-ops?utm_campaign=kitten_overflow
Both are the same content to People but to the Googles, these are two different URLs. What you want is for Google to rank and show all URL variations as the first one. That's canonicalization.
Moz's article focuses mainly on canonicalizing internal content which is definitely advisable. (Go do that!)
But I want to call out point #6 specifically as it applies to some heavy-hitter developer media outlets.
Canonicalize cross-domain duplicate content
When you post your own original content to an external site, wouldn't it be great if you could tell Google to rank your site as the OG source?
You might be able to. Sites like dev.to (canonical_url) and Dzone (Original Source) both allow you to set canonical sources.
Is there a catch? Not for you. Instead, the publisher doesn't get ranked if they allow this.
Very generous indeed.
Have a lovely day,
Kamran
