Google Recommends You Embrace Your Canonical URLs In Your Sitemap File

Google’s Gary Illyes mentioned on LinkedIn this morning that it is best to “embrace the URLs that you’d need to see as canonical in your sitemaps.” This isn’t essentially new recommendation, Google has mentioned this quite a few instances, however Gary had a purpose to repeat this recommendation for some purpose.

Gary added, “It is regular to have some duplicate content material in your website, however you need to give engines like google as many hints as you possibly can about which model ought to be canonical (I.e. proven in search outcomes). Sitemaps is a type of hints. Not as robust as rel-canonical and undoubtedly not even close to redirects, however it may be helpful nonetheless.”

So, the strongest sign is the redirect, then rel-canonical, after which sitemap file? There are in all probability indicators within the combine, like your inner hyperlinks, exterior hyperlinks, and extra.

I imply, it’s logical to have your canonical URL in your sitemap. That simply appears logical. However I suppose Gary is seeing quite a lot of people not doing this?

In 2016, John Mueller mentioned we suggest simply submitting a sitemap for the URLs that you simply need to have listed, not for all variations and in 2018, he mentioned URLs in sitemap recordsdata are used to find out the canonical URL.

So if you’re serving non-canonical URLs in your sitemap file, strive to not?

Discussion board dialogue at LinkedIn.