AIOSEO Documentation

Documentation, Reference Materials, and Tutorials for AIOSEO

Canonical URLs in All in One SEO

Canonical URLs are an essential part of SEO and are especially important with WordPress.

Whilst Canonical URLs are a feature built into WordPress, All in One SEO can help you manage them.

In This Article

What Are Canonical URLs?

Canonical URLs make sure that search engines don’t get confused when different URLs point to the same content.

For example, in WordPress you can have multiple ways to reach content. You may have a blog post about “the difference between cats and dogs” which you’ve placed in two categories. This would result in two URLs that lead to the same blog post as follows:

https://mydomain.com/cats/the-difference-between-cats-and-dogs/
https://mydomain.com/dogs/the-difference-between-cats-and-dogs/

As both URLs point to the same post, a canonical URL would tell search engines which is the preferred URL for your post, so that they don’t think you have duplicate content on your site.

WordPress does a great job of outputting the canonical URL for your content. All in One SEO just supplements WordPress by adding some advanced features as follows:

Creating Custom Canonical URLs

All in One SEO lets you specify your own canonical URL for any item of content. You can find this setting by editing your content and scrolling down to the AIOSEO Settings section and click on the Advanced tab.

Enter the full URL you want to set for the Canonical URL in the field.

No Pagination for Canonical URLs

All in One SEO also lets you remove the page numbers from the Canonical URLs of paginated content. This means that you can point paginated content to the first page.

For example, page 2 of my Hello World post would normally have the URL https://mydomain.com/hello-world/page/2/ but All in One SEO would set the Canonical URL to https://mydomain.com/hello-world/.

You can find this setting by clicking on Search Appearance in the All in One SEO menu and then clicking on the Advanced tab.

No Pagination for Canonical URLs setting

Change the toggle to Yes to remove page numbers from the Canonical URLs of paginated content.

Check out our video on Optimizing Pages with Pagination below:

Canonical URLs are an essential part of SEO and are especially important with WordPress.

They make sure that search engines don't get confused when different URLs point to the same content.

For example, in WordPress you can have multiple ways to reach content. You may have a blog post about "the difference between cats and dogs" which you've placed in two categories. This would result in two URLs that lead to the same blog post as follows:

https://mydomain.com/cats/the-difference-between-cats-and-dogs/
https://mydomain.com/dogs/the-difference-between-cats-and-dogs/

As both URLs point to the same post, a canonical URL would tell search engines which is the preferred URL for your post, so that they don't think you have duplicate content on your site.

WordPress does a great job of outputting the canonical URL for your content. All in One SEO just supplements WordPress by adding some advanced features as follows:

Custom Canonical URLs

All in One SEO lets you specify your own canonical URL for any item of content. You can find this setting by editing your content and scrolling down to the All in One SEO section.

Custom Canonical URL setting in All in One SEO

Enter the full URL you want to set for the Custom Canonical URL in the field.

No Pagination for Canonical URLs

All in One SEO also lets you remove the page numbers from the Canonical URLs of paginated content. This means that you can point paginated content to the first page.

For example, page 2 of my Hello World post would normally have the URL https://mydomain.com/hello-world/page/2/ but All in One SEO would set the Canonical URL to https://mydomain.com/hello-world/.

You can find this setting by clicking on General Settings in the All in One SEO menu and then you'll see a checkbox for No Pagination for Canonical URLs.

General Settings in All in One SEO

Check the box to enable the setting and remove page numbers from the Canonical URLs of paginated content.

Canonical URLs

If you want to disable all Canonical URL features in All in One SEO then uncheck the box for Canonical URLs found under All in One SEO » General Settings.