Canonical Tag Checker
Check a page's canonical tag — the URL Google is told to rank.
How to use Canonical Tag Checker
- Enter the page URL and click “Check Canonical”.
- Compare the canonical to the page's own URL — self-referencing is correct for normal pages.
- Investigate mismatches: pointing at the homepage, another domain, or a redirecting/404 URL are bugs to fix in the template or plugin.
- Audit after migrations and plugin updates — the two events that silently rewrite canonicals sitewide.
What is Canonical Tag Checker?
A canonical tag checker fetches a page and reads its <link rel="canonical" href="…"> — the tag that tells search engines which URL is the authoritative version when the same content lives at several addresses (http/https, www/non-www, trailing slashes, tracking parameters, print views).
The tag concentrates ranking signals onto one URL instead of splitting them across duplicates. Its power is also its danger: a canonical pointing at the wrong page tells Google "rank that one instead of me" — and Google largely obeys. Wrong canonicals are among the quietest catastrophic SEO bugs: the page looks perfect in a browser while search sends every signal elsewhere.
About the Canonical Tag Checker
Enter a URL, click Check Canonical, and see exactly what canonical the page serves — and whether it's self-referencing (correct for most pages), pointing elsewhere (correct only for true duplicates), missing, or broken.
The bug catalog this catches: every page canonicalizing to the homepage (a misconfigured plugin — deep pages surrender their rankings to the front page); canonicals to the staging or http domain after a migration; canonicals to redirect or 404 targets (a contradiction Google resolves by ignoring or worse); and mixed signals where hreflang, sitemap and canonical disagree about the preferred URL.
The rule for healthy sites: every indexable page carries a self-referencing canonical — its own clean, absolute, https URL — and only genuine duplicates point elsewhere. Check key templates after migrations, plugin updates and domain changes; that's when canonicals silently break.