In this age of technology, we are living in the two worlds; one is real and the other world is virtual. Just like there are many people in real life who share a single name, several websites also share a common URL.

Sometimes this causes confuses if even two of those persons are brought together and if it is this problematic for the human mind we can just imagine how confusing it gets for the Google Bots to distinguish between two websites sharing an URL.

While there are certain unique identities assigned to the humans to tell apart from each other despite having a same name, for example the most effective one; their faces, the technical problems require technical solutions and one such solution for identical URLs are Canonical URL.

Just like twins in humans Race are always born from the same mother, these identical URLs with different webpages belong to the same websites and when the time comes for Google to present them to the users, they are often confused as to which pages they are being asked for.

According to them, this problem arises when a website either has a system which allows a single page to be accessed through multiple URLs (this situation can occur when there are two different versions of a website; one for computer and laptops and one for the mobile devices) or the website has at least two pages with the same content.

Google has categorized them as the Duplicate Versions and only one of those identical pages or URLs will be crawled regularly by their Bots to save their time, effort and energy.

The website owners are required to decide which one of these are more important for them and they can instruct Google to choose it to be the Canonical URL.

In case the owners do not perform this simple task of letting them know, it will be decided by the as per the criteria set by the Google which has not been told to the public.

It is better for the website owners to decide which one is the Canonical URL from the point of views of the experts keeping in mind the Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The reason behind this is that you get the power to divert the traffic to the page you want and to tell Google which page to crawl and which not to. you just need to make sure your canonical URL contains quality content and it will help you rank better on Search Engine Result Pages.