Robots.txt, Canonical Tags & Duplicate Content

Managing Crawl Budget & Duplicate URLs

Large websites often have multiple URLs displaying identical or similar content (e.g. e-commerce product pages with tracking query parameters ?color=blue&size=m).

1. The Canonical Tag (rel="canonical")

A Canonical Tag tells search engines which master URL represents the authoritative original version of a page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://dochero.com/courses/digital-marketing-seo">

If 5 different URLs point to the same content, setting the canonical tag consolidates link authority onto the main URL and eliminates duplicate content penalties!

2. Managing Crawl Budget in robots.txt

Search engines assign each site a Crawl Budget (the max number of pages Googlebot will crawl per day).

• Use Disallow: /search? in robots.txt to prevent crawlers from wasting budget on internal search result pages or temporary filter URLs.